Nora Roberts - Sacred Sins

For a moment Ben stood silently in the open doorway, too stunned to go in, too shocked to close the door and leave her the privacy she’d sought.

He’d never seen her as the helpless victim of her own emotions. In bed there were times she seemed utterly guided by her own passion. Occasionally he’d seen her temper flare, teetering briefly on full blossoming. Then she snapped it back, always. Now it was grief, and the grief was total.

She hadn’t heard him open the door. Slowly, her body rocked back and forth in a rhythm of mourning. Self-comfort. Ben’s throat tightened, driving back the bitterness. He started to touch her, then hesitated. It was harder, he discovered, unbelievably harder to comfort someone who really mattered.

“Tess.” When he did touch her, she jolted. When his arms went around her, she went board stiff. He could feel her fighting to block off the tears, and him. “Come on, you should sit down.”

“No.” Humiliation washed through her already weakened system. She’d been caught in her lowest and most private moment, stripped naked, without the strength to cover herself. She wanted only solitude, and the time to rebuild. “Please just leave me alone for a while.”

It hurt-her resistance, her rejection of the comfort he needed to give. It hurt enough that he started to draw away. Then he felt the shudder pass through her, a shudder more poignant, more pitiful than even the tears. In silence he moved over and shut off the tap.

She’d uncovered her face to wrap her fingers around the lip of the sink. Her back was ramrod straight, as if she were braced to ward off a blow or a helping hand. Drenched, her eyes met his. Her skin was already streaked and reddened from tears. He didn’t say a word, didn’t think of the angles as he lifted her into his arms and carried her from the room.

He expected a struggle, some fierce and furious words. Instead her body went limp as she turned her face into his throat and let herself cry.

“He was just a child.”

Ben sat on the edge of the bed and gathered her closer. The tears were hot on his skin, as if they had burned behind her eyes for too long. “I know.”

“I couldn’t reach him. I should have been able to. All the education, all the training, the self-analysis, the books and lectures, and I couldn’t reach him.”

“You tried.”

“That’s not good enough.” The anger sprang out, full-blown and vicious, but it didn’t surprise him. He’d been waiting for it, hoping for it. “I’m supposed to heal. I’m supposed to help, not just talk of helping. I didn’t just fail to complete his treatment, I failed to keep him alive.”

“Are psychiatrists required to have godlike egos?”

Like a slap in the face, his words jarred her away from him. In an instant she was on her feet. The tears were still drying on her face, her body still trembling, but she didn’t look as though she would collapse. “How dare you say that to me? A young boy is dead. He’ll never have a chance to drive a car, to fall in love, to start a family. He’s dead, and the fact that I’m responsible hasn’t anything to do with ego.”

“Doesn’t it?” Ben rose as well, and before she could turn away, took her shoulders. “You’re supposed to be perfect, always in control, always having the answers, the solutions? This time you didn’t have them and you weren’t quite indestructible. You tell me, could you have stopped him from going to that bridge?”

“I should’ve been able to.” The sob was dry and shaky as she pressed the heel of her hand between her brows. “No. No, I couldn’t give him enough.”

With his arm around her again, he drew her back to the bed. For the first time in their relationship he felt needed, leaned on. In the normal course of events it would have been his cue to make for the door. Instead he sat with her, taking her hand as her head rested on his shoulder. Complete. It was odd and a little frightening to feel complete.

“Tess, this is the boy you told me about before, isn’t it?”

She remembered the night of her dream, the night she’d woken to find Ben warm, and willing to listen. “Yes. I’ve been worried about what he might do for weeks.”

“And you told his parents?”

“Yes, I told them, but-”

“They didn’t want to hear it.”

“It shouldn’t have made any difference. I should have been able to-” She broke off when he turned her face to his. “No,” she said on a long breath, “they didn’t want to hear it. His mother pulled him out of therapy.”

“And cut the strings.”

“It might have pushed him a bit farther inward, but I don’t think it was the final factor that drove him to suicide.” The grief was still there, cold and hard in her stomach, but her mind was clearing enough for her to see past her own involvement. “I think something else happened tonight.”

“And you think you know what it was?”

“Maybe.” She rose again, unable to sit. “I’ve been trying to contact Joey’s father for weeks. His phones disconnected. I even went by his apartment a few days ago, but he’d moved without leaving a forwarding address. He was supposed to spend this weekend with Joey.” Tess rubbed tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “Joey had been counting on it, too heavily. When his father didn’t come for him, it was another brick on his back. Maybe the last one he could carry. He was a beautiful boy, a young man really.” Fresh tears started, but this time the grief loosened and came clean. “He’d had such a tough time, and yet there was this warmth just under the surface, this great need to be loved. He just didn’t believe he deserved to have anyone really care about him.”

“And you cared.”

“Yes. Maybe too much.”

It was strange, but the small, hard ball of resentment coated with a thin layer of bitterness that he’d carried in his gut since his brother’s death began to break apart. He looked at her-the aloof, the objective psychiatrist, the poker and prodder of minds-and saw the real and human scars of grief, not just for the patient, but for the boy.

“Tess, what his mother said back at the hospital…”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does. She was wrong.”

Tess turned away, and in the dim light from the hallway saw her own reflection in the mirror above her dresser. “Only partly. You see, I’ll never know that if I’d pushed in a different direction, tried another angle, whether it would have made a difference.”

“She was wrong,” Ben repeated. “A few years ago I said some of those same things. Maybe I was wrong too.”

In the glass her gaze shifted and met his. He was still sitting on the bed, in the shadows. He looked alone. It was strange, because she had considered him a man constantly surrounded by friends, good feelings, his own self-confidence. She turned, but not certain he wanted her to reach out, remained where she was.

“I’ve never told you about Josh, my brother.”

“No. You’ve never told me much about your family. I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“He was almost four years older than me.” It didn’t take the use of the past tense to tell her Josh was dead. She’d known it as soon as Ben had said the name. “He was one of those people who have gold on the ends of their fingers. No matter what he did, he did it better than anyone else. When we were kids we had this set of Tinker Toys. I’d built a little car, Josh would build a sixteen-wheeler. In school I’d maybe pull a B if I studied until my eyes dropped out. Josh would ace a test without opening a book. He just absorbed. My mother used to say he was blessed. She kept hoping he’d be a priest, because once he was ordained, he’d probably be able to perform miracles.”