The Therapist

by B.A. Paris

‘Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.’”

Maria and Tim are in their late thirties. Tim is a qualified psychologist, working part-time while he undergoes further specialist training in psychotherapy, and Maria is a speech therapist, working four days a week until Luke, their youngest son, starts at nursery.

It’s only when I’m making up the sofa bed that I realize I didn’t ask him why he wanted the house so much.

Something isn’t adding up. Leo seems paranoid about my fictitious reporter. And his behavior yesterday when I first confronted him had been over the top. He’d looked as if he’d been about to pass out. But his reason for not telling me—that he wanted this house because it provided him with security—doesn’t stand up.

“After almost twenty years?” “I think time has no meaning when it comes to grief.”

Had Lorna really whispered Don’t trust anyone when she’d leaned into me, or had I imagined it?

“Do you know what Henry David Thoreau believed? ‘Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.’”

“It’s hard to realize that the man you married never really existed at all.”

And then I realize—the woman who had come to Harlestone, supposedly wanting to know what it was like to live in the village, had had long blond hair.

Despite therapy, I have never recovered from killing my parents and sister. The judge’s refusal to send me to jail, even though I begged him to, robbed me of my need to be punished and I’ve been punishing myself ever since.