Blake Pierce - The Perfect Affair

As she crossed the living room to go back to bed, she wondered where the online newsletter was that talked about how almost-thirty-year-old female professionals also needed decent sleep every now and then. She was just smiling to herself when she tripped on a shoe Hannah had left in the middle of the room and stumbled to the floor, slamming her left knee on the hardwood.

She forced herself to stifle the curse word she wanted to yell. Instead she groaned silently as she pulled herself up and limped back to bed. With her knee aching, her heart still palpitating, and her mind racing, she resigned herself to another half-sleepless night, all courtesy of the teenager she’d agreed to let live with her.

I think I got better sleep when I was being hunted by a serial killer.

The gallows humor made her chuckle to herself but didn’t make her any sleepier.

“I didn’t do it,” Hannah insisted angrily.

Jessie sat across the breakfast table from her, stunned. She couldn’t believe the girl was denying it.

“Hannah, there are only two people living here. I went to bed before you did. When I said goodnight, you were watching TV. When I was woken up in the middle of the night, it was on. You don’t have to work for the LAPD to know who’s responsible for that.”

Hannah stared at her, her green eyes full of conviction.

“Jessie, I don’t want to be disrespectful. But you admitted that you’ve had trouble sleeping lately. And at your age, memory starts to falter a little. Is it possible that you’re forgetting something you actually did, and are blaming it on me because you’re buying into the stereotype of the lazy, forgetful teenager?”

Jessie stared back, dumbfounded at Hannah’s boldness. It was a stunning move, to lie about something so obvious, for no discernible reason.

“You know I track serial killers for a living, right?” she reminded her. “I’m not exactly susceptible to gaslighting from you.”

Hannah took the last bite of her toast and stood up, her sandy-blonde hair falling in her face as she stretched to her full, gangly height of five foot nine, only an inch shorter than Jessie.

“Don’t we have to get to that therapist appointment this morning?” she asked, ignoring Jessie’s comment completely. “I thought it was at nine. It’s eight thirty-two right now.”

She headed back to her bedroom to finish getting dressed, leaving her plate and empty cup on the table. Jessie fought the urge to call after her and tell her to toss the stuff in the dishwasher.

She reminded herself of the personal limitations she’d established when Hannah first came to live with her two months ago. She was not, and would not try to be, the girl’s parent. Her job was to provide a safe environment for the half-sister she’d never known to recover after a series of traumatizing incidents. Her job was to help Hannah heal and reintegrate into a world that seemed fraught with dangers all around her. Her job was to be a source of support and security. Jessie knew all that instinctively and intellectually, and yet she couldn’t help but wonder why the hell the kid couldn’t put a frickin’ dish away.

As she cleaned up, she told herself for the thousandth time that this was all normal, that Hannah was acting out as a way of asserting control over her own life, something she’d sorely lacked lately, that it wasn’t personal and it wouldn’t last forever.

She told herself all of these things. But deep down, she wasn’t sure she believed any of them. Some part of her worried that there was something darker going on inside Hannah. And she feared that it might be irreversible.

Jessie was getting antsy.

She knew Hannah’s session with Dr. Lemmon would end any second. Would the girl come out of the office crying, like she had on the last visit? Or stone-faced, like after the previous two?

If anyone could reach Hannah, Jessie had to believe it was Dr. Janice Lemmon. Despite her unassuming look, the woman was not to be trifled with. Her small frame, tight blonde perm, and thick glasses made the sixty-something behavioral therapist look more like someone’s grandma than one of the most well-regarded experts on aberrant behavior on the West Coast. But underneath that ordinary facade was a woman so highly respected that she still occasionally consulted for the LAPD, the FBI, and other organizations that she never spoke of. She also happened to be Jessie’s therapist.

At first, Jessie was concerned that having her treat Hannah as well might be a conflict of interest. But after some discussion, they agreed that there were only a few doctors who were qualified to treat a girl who’d been through Hannah’s experiences. And since Dr. Lemmon was already intimately familiar with some of Hannah’s family history, she was a logical choice.

After all, it was Dr. Lemmon who had helped Jessie deal with the reality that her father was the notorious serial killer Xander Thurman. It was Dr. Lemmon who talked her through the nightmares and anxiety she suffered as a result of watching her father kill her mother when she was six years old. It was Dr. Lemmon who got her to open up about being left alone by him to die in a snowy cabin, trapped for three days next to the rotting corpse of the woman she had called mommy. It was Dr. Lemmon who helped give her the confidence that she could stand up to her father when he reentered her life twenty-three years later, bent on either converting her into a murderer who would join him or killing her if she wouldn’t.

She was the only credible choice of therapists to work with her half-sister, who shared the very same father and equally brutal nightmares. Only a few months ago, Thurman had kidnapped Hannah and her adoptive parents and made the girl watch as he slaughtered them. He’d almost killed Jessie in front of her too. Only their collective quick thinking and grit had turned the tables and left him dead.

But even after that, Hannah’s trauma didn’t end. Only months after the death of her adoptive parents, an entirely different serial killer named Bolton Crutchfield, an acolyte of her father with a fixation on Jessie, had killed her foster parents in front of her and abducted her. He held her in an isolated basement for a week, trying to indoctrinate her, to mold her into a killer like Thurman and himself.

She survived that horror as well, rescued by Jessie and a clever double-cross of her own. Bolton Crutchfield had been gunned down. And though he was no longer a physical threat, Jessie wasn’t as confident that he hadn’t wormed his way into Hannah’s head, corrupting her with his sick faith, defined by nihilism and blood.

Jessie stood up, in part to stretch but also because she could feel herself sinking into mental quicksand. She looked at herself in the waiting room mirror. She had to admit that, despite spending the last two months as the unexpected guardian of a troubled teenager, she was still presentable.

Her green eyes were bright and clear. Her shoulder-length brown hair was clean, conditioned, and loose, unburdened by her standard work ponytail. A long stretch of not fearing she was being hunted by a serial killer had allowed her to resume a semi-normal workout routine, giving her five-foot-ten-inch frame a strength and solidity it had lost for a while.

Most impressive of all, none of her recent cases had involved shootouts, knife attacks, or anything approaching personal injury. As a result, she hadn’t added any new scars to her massive collection, which included a puncture wound in the abdomen, angry lines along both arms and legs, and a long, pinkish moon-shaped scar that ran five inches horizontally along her collarbone from the base of her neck to her right shoulder.