Sidney Sheldon’s The Silent Widow. Тилли Бэгшоу

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       CHAPTER THREE

       LISA

      ‘So, Lisa. How has your week been?’

      Dr Nikki Roberts leaned back in her faded black leather armchair and smiled warmly at her patient.

       Lisa Flannagan. Twenty-eight years old. Former model and long-term mistress of Willie Baden, septuagenarian billionaire owner of the LA Rams. Recovering Vicodin addict. Narcissist.

      ‘Pretty good actually,’ Lisa smiled back and, pressing her palms together, leaned forward in a little bow of gratitude. ‘Namaste. I’m really feeling at peace about moving on from Willie. Like, I’m in a place of light, you know?’

      ‘That’s great.’ Nikki nodded encouragingly. Raindrops were tap-tapping against the window. This was her last session of the day, thank God. All she wanted was to get home. Switch off. Let the rain lull her to sleep.

      ‘I know, right?’ Lisa beamed. ‘Your advice in our last session helped me soooooo much.’

      Lisa talked like this a lot: in clichés and exclamation points, like a teenage girl who’d swallowed her first self-help book whole, and now considered herself ‘a spiritual person’. As a psychologist, and a highly successful one at that, Nikki didn’t judge. She merely observed, and offered techniques to help her patient modify harmful behaviors and break destructive cycles.

      As a person, however, it was a different story.

      As a person, she judged plenty.

      Lisa Flannagan was a user. A homewrecker. A baby-killer. A slut.

      Sinking back into Dr Roberts’ soft, over-stuffed couch, Lisa Flannagan poured out her heart.

      ‘I moved out of the apartment,’ she announced proudly. ‘I actually did it.’

      God, it felt good! Such a release, to come to a place where she was truly seen and understood and just let it all out.

      ‘Willie was, like, in shock. He was so mad, I thought he was going to hit me. Screaming and yelling and smashing things up.’

      ‘Did he threaten you?’ Nikki asked.

      ‘Oh yeah. Sure he did. “You can’t do this to me. I own you. I’ll destroy you. You’re nothing without me!” All of that. But I was super calm. I was like, “No, baby. You need to understand. This is something I need to do for myself. Like, I’m twenty-eight years old, you know? I’m not a child.”’

      Lisa looked forward to her Wednesday-night therapy sessions at Dr Roberts’ plush Century City offices the way she used to look forward to scoring Vicodin, or getting laid by one of Willie’s big, black NFL players in the Beverly Hills apartment he’d bought for her two years ago. Back then, she hadn’t seen how totally controlling Willie was being. Like he was trying to buy her or something. Dr Roberts had totally opened her eyes on that score.

      She’d also helped Lisa to realize how much inner strength she had. Like, kicking the pills was a big deal. Willie had picked up Lisa’s tab at Promises, but it was Lisa who’d agreed to go to rehab, Lisa who’d changed her own life.

       I’m a good person.

       If left the drugs behind, I can leave Willie Baden behind.

      She would keep the apartment, of course. Or rather, she would sell it and keep the money. Ditto the Cartier sapphire-and-diamond necklace Willie had bought her for her twenty-fifth. New starts were all well and good, but Lisa Flannagan wasn’t about to walk away destitute from an eight-year relationship with a billionaire. That would be plain stupid. Besides, it wasn’t as if Willie needed the money back. Plus she’d done the responsible thing and terminated his baby, not hung around and demanded baby-momma money for the rest of her life, like most girls would have. The way Lisa saw it, once Willie got over the initial blow to his pride, there was no reason why she and her married lover couldn’t part as friends.

      As she talked, sipping cucumber water from the jug on Dr Roberts’ coffee table, Lisa Flannagan stole occasional glances at the woman sitting opposite her, the therapist she had grown to rely on and to think of almost as a friend.

       Dr Nikki Roberts.

      What was her life like, outside these offices?

      Thanks to Google, Lisa already knew the basic facts: Dr Nicola Roberts, née Hammond, thirty-eight years old. Graduated from Columbia before doing a postgrad in psychology at UCLA and an internship at Ronald Reagan Medical Center.

      Lisa wondered whether that was where Dr Roberts had met her husband, Dr Douglas Roberts, a neurosurgeon and specialist in addiction-related brain disorders. Unfortunately, she couldn’t ask. Asking your therapist personal questions was against the rules.

      What Lisa did know was that Dr Roberts’ husband had been killed in a tragic car accident last year, right about the time she first started coming to therapy. The LA Times had reported on his death, because by all accounts Doug Roberts had been an amazing guy and a big deal in the LA charity world, campaigning tirelessly to help the city’s addicts wherever he found them, from downtown’s skid row to the mansions of Bel Air.

      It was bizarre to think that the poised, attractive, professional woman sitting opposite Lisa, with her sleek brunette bob similar to Lisa’s own hair, СКАЧАТЬ