“You must be Dr. Harrison,” she says with a smile.
I reach my hand out over the table and she shakes it with a firm grip.
“Thank you so much for meeting with me, Dr. Basantis. When I saw that you’d set up camp in town, it seemed too good to be true,” I tell her.
She waves the flattery away.
“I should be thanking you,” she says, snapping her laptop shut. “I’ve been looking for someone like this for over a year now.”
I nod. “She’s very special.” I swallow hard. Special doesn’t cover it. “She’s passionate about her students’ mental health and about education. I’d love for you to talk to her.”
She slides her laptop into her messenger bag. Her dark eyes crinkle at the corners and she tilts her head like she can see right into my mind.
“Let’s get a coffee and you can tell me all about this Ms. Gallagher.”
I nod and let her lead the way.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Devon
Lesson 49: Ambushes can be helpful.
“Mom!” I shout up the staircase as I yank off my jacket and hang it on the hook in the hallway. “You are not going to believe how shitty my day was.”
Silence meets my somewhat whiny voice that I reserve only for conversations with the woman who is forced to love me by genetics.
“Mom?”
I hold still in the hallway, halting my progress toward the Friday-post-shitty-week beer that has my name on it. I listen for her snores. Another lucky inheritance for me.
Nothing.
“Kathy?” I try again, turning back toward the front of the house to check for her car.
As I pull back the curtain, something like hope courses through me. But it’s swallowed quickly. The old hunk of junk sits unmoved in the driveway. Why wouldn’t it be? She must be out back with the chickens—socializing.
Just before I let the heavy fabric slip from my fingers, the puttering of an engine fills the living room space and a hunter green sedan bumps its way up our long driveway between the leafless trees. I stare, wondering who the hell is visiting my mother or myself on a Friday afternoon. Well, really, on any afternoon. We don’t entertain often.
I hit my forehead on the glass trying to get a better look at the driver—a woman in glasses who I’ve never seen in my life. But my focus is interrupted when my mother slips out of the passenger seat and slams the car door behind her, yelling and waving her goodbyes as the stranger reverses back from where she came. I’m rubbing the place where I smacked my head, sure to be a horn within the hour, as my mother sort of skips up the porch and stops when she sees me staring out the window.
She lifts her hand in greeting, but I can’t find my muscles. I just stare at her, my mind muddled with impossible explanations.She was kidnapped. Then returned by the FBI.Didn’t my phone ping a silver alert today? My mother shrugs the shoulders of her sherpa-lined coat and pushes through the front door so that I’m left staring at the snow dust whipping around our front yard like ghosts.
“Hi, honey,” she says.
I turn slowly. Lift a brow.
“How was your day?” she asks.
I laugh. She rolls her eyes and hangs her coat beside mine.
“My day was shit. Principal Dickhead is still angry at me for initiating the crisis protocol for that student I told you about and then on top of that, he removed all of my mental health posters from my room.”
I feel rage about all of this—the insanity of being told not to save a child in the way I’ve been trained. Jessica is where she belongs now thanks to that training—that protocol put in place to protect. But none of that matters to the powers that be. What matters is that I’ve cracked the ice Jess was trapped under, and while she can finally breathe, the cracks in the district’s veneer are now visible to everyone looking on.
I let out my anger on a breath and focus on my mother. “But none of that matters because I believe someone else had a good day. I believe someone has been hiding something from their favorite daughter.”
She moves toward the kitchen and I follow her.
