Ladies' Night, Andrews, Kay [best time to read books .txt] 📗

Paula was standing in the reception area, staring down at the computer terminal, when Grace walked inside.

“Grace?” Paula looked up and frowned. Her blond curls were mussed and there were dark circles under her unmade-up eyes. She wore a faded, shapeless black jersey dress that hung limply on her slender frame and cheap red rubber flip-flops. There were no tinkly earrings or ankle bracelets this morning. It didn’t look like she’d had a fun weekend.

That makes two of us, Grace thought.

“This is a surprise,” Paula said. “Is there something urgent you need to discuss?”

Grace cleared her throat. “Uh, yes, actually, there is something kind of important I’d like to talk to you about. That’s okay, right? I mean, in the beginning, you told us we could call you about anything.”

“Well … I suppose I have time,” Paula said, hesitantly. “My first group doesn’t start until ten thirty. Come on inside.”

Grace followed the therapist into the inner office. The heat was stifling. She watched while Paula switched on the lights and then a small window-air-conditioning unit. “Sit down,” Paula said, grabbing one of the folding chairs from the semicircle and dragging it over to a position in front of her desk.

“I’m going to make some tea,” Paula said. “Would you like a cup?”

What she’d like, Grace thought nervously, was a Xanax, or at least a stiff cocktail. “No thanks,” she said politely.

Paula drifted around the room, putting a kettle on a hot plate, rearranging the circle of chairs, and then, finally, when the tea kettle whistled, pouring the water into a lumpy pottery mug.

“Now,” she said, settling into the chair behind her desk. “What’s happening in your world today, Grace?”

“Um.” Grace fidgeted with the strap of her purse. She’d rehearsed her speech half a dozen times at home and in the car this morning, but there was no way she could make this an easy discussion.

“The thing is, Paula,” she started. “I think there’s something happening in your world that we need to discuss.”

“Oh?” Paula cautiously sipped her tea. “And how is anything in my world relevant to you?”

Grace felt her face grow warm. “I’ve been attending your divorce-recovery sessions—for six weeks now—because Judge Stackpole basically made it a condition of granting my divorce. And the others in my group—Camryn, Ashleigh, and Wyatt—Judge Stackpole sent them to you, too.”

“That’s correct,” Paula said. “The judge has been a wonderful advocate for my healing work.”

“He’s been your lover, too,” Grace blurted. “Right?”

Paula looked like she’d been slapped. “I beg your pardon?”

Grace took a deep breath, and the words came tumbling out. “We saw you together! That night the judge dropped in on our session. Wyatt and I came back here to your office. We saw you getting out of his car. You’d obviously had a big fight. You were yelling at him, and then you got out of his car and kicked his tires. You were crying and really upset.”

“You’re mistaken,” Paula said, her voice low.

“We both saw you, Paula,” Grace insisted. “And we know it was Judge Stackpole, because after he left you, we followed him back to his house on Longboat Key.”

Bright pink splotches of color bloomed on Paula’s long pale face. “The judge is … a friend. We had a misunderstanding that night. That’s all.”

“I don’t think so. We all noticed how you were around him that night. You were absolutely … giddy. Come on, Paula. You’re always after all of us about honesty. Why don’t you be honest with me? Admit you’re having an affair with Stackpole.”

Paula’s hands shook so violently she had to set the mug of tea on the desktop. “Therapists never discuss their personal life with their patients. This is highly inappropriate, Grace.” Her voice was stern, but Grace noticed that Paula was now clasping her hands tightly together in her lap—probably to stop the shaking.

Grace was shaking, too. But now the fear was gone, replaced by anger.

“Inappropriate? Do you want to talk about appropriate behavior, Paula? Because that’s a subject I’d love to discuss with you. What would you say about a prominent judge—who, by the way, is married—having an affair with a therapist? Would you say it’s appropriate for that judge to require parties in divorces in his court to attend therapy with his mistress?”

“Mistress!” Paula yelped. “How dare you?”

Paula’s outrage only fueled Grace’s refusal to back down.

“Mistress—it’s a nasty word, isn’t it, Paula? But that’s what you are. You’re sleeping with him, and in return he sends all these shell-shocked divorce disasters right here to your office, where they pay handsomely for the privilege of listening to your hypocrisy. The five people in my group are forking over fifteen hundred dollars a week for this bullshit,” Grace said. “How much of that do you have to kick to Stackpole, Paula? Half? Or does he even let you keep that much?”

“You’ve got no right to talk to me like this,” Paula said, pushing back from her desk, looking wildly around the room for an escape hatch.

“What are you gonna do, Paula? Rat me out to the judge? Flunk me out of divorce camp? I have every right to call you out. But what I want to know is, When do you call him out? Huh, Paula? When do you quit being his victim?”

Paula’s eyes flared. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure I do. You moved here from Oregon after your life went up in flames—a bad divorce, a nasty little pill habit, then the arrest and then rehab. You moved to Florida to start over again, right? But you can’t get licensed to call yourself a therapist here, can you? And then you meet Stackpole, and the two of you cook up this little ‘divorce recovery’ racket.”

“It’s not a racket,” Paula said fiercely. “I care deeply about my patients. I counsel them and do my damnedest to help them…” Her voice trailed off, and her shoulders slumped.

“Avoid what happened to you?” Grace finished it for her. “How are you going