Chapter 7: The Message from a Friend
I stared at the text for a long time.
*About what he's not telling you.*
I had just spent two hours inside that building watching three years of assumption dissolve and reform into something I hadn't expected.
I had read my dead mother's handwriting.
I had looked at a photograph of the sister my husband had never mentioned.
I had believed, sitting in that client chair, that I finally had the full shape of the thing.
And now this.
I typed back: *Who is this?*
The reply came in under a minute.
*Someone who cares about what happens to you.
Can we meet?
Not near his office.*
I looked up through the windscreen at the ordinary building on the edge of town.
The door was closed.
The sign above it was small and tasteful and said nothing dramatic.
*Where?* I typed.
A coffee shop.
Twenty minutes away.
Half an hour from now.
I started the engine.
The woman was already there when I arrived.
She was sitting at a corner table with both hands around a cup she wasn't drinking from.
She was perhaps fifty, well-dressed, with the kind of careful posture that suggested she had spent a long time making herself take up less space.
She stood when she saw me.
"Elena?"
"Yes." I sat down across from her.
"You have about five minutes to explain how you got my number and why I shouldn't leave right now."
"My name is Patricia Hale," she said.
"I was a client of Marco's.
Past tense." She sat back down.
"And I got your number from his receptionist.
She shouldn't have given it to me.
But she did."
"Why?"
"Because I asked her to.
Because I told her what I knew." She wrapped both hands around the cup again.
"I want to be honest with you.
I came here because I think you deserve to know something.
Not because I want to cause trouble."
"What do you know?"
She looked at the table.
Then at me.
"Marco has a second practice."
I kept my expression still.
"What do you mean?"
"A second location.
About forty miles from here.
Different name on the door.
Different booking system." She reached into her bag and placed a business card on the table between us.
"I found out by accident.
I have a friend who lives out that way.
She mentioned her therapist.
Described him.
I recognized it immediately."
I picked up the card.
The name on it was not Marco's.
It was a business name — *Renewal Aesthetics* — and a street address I didn't know.
"Why would he have a second practice under a different name?" I asked.
"That," Patricia said, "is exactly what I think you should find out."
"Do you have any idea why?"
She hesitated.
"I have a theory.
But I want to be careful, because I could be wrong." She paused.
"Some of his clients at the second location — my friend described them differently.
Younger.
Some of them very young.
And the treatments she described weren't the kind of thing Marco does.
Not restoration work.
Something else."
My hand tightened around the business card.
"She could be wrong," Patricia said again.
"She only went once.
She didn't like the atmosphere and she didn't go back.
But she described the man running it, and Elena—" She stopped.
"It sounded like Marco."
I set the card down on the table.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.
"You don't know me."
"No," she said.
"But I know what it feels like to be the last person in the room to understand what's happening around you." She looked at her cup.
"I was married for nineteen years before I found out who my husband actually was.
I wish someone had handed me a business card."
I looked at the address on the card again.
Forty miles.
A different name.
"Thank you," I said.
I left the coffee shop, sat in my car, and called Marco.
He picked up on the second ring.
"Elena.
I was just about to—"
"What is Renewal Aesthetics?" I said.
Silence.
Not the silence of someone thinking.
The silence of someone who has just heard the specific thing they were hoping they would never hear.
"Where did you hear that name?" he said finally.
"Answer the question, Marco."
Another pause.
Longer this time.
"Come back to the office," he said.
May you like
"Please.
Don't go to that address alone."
