Page 90 of The Truth in My Lies (Secrets of Suburbi 1)

“I’m not lying, Ben. She’s real. She is. I was just there the other day.” I fished the note out of my pocket and handed it to him. “She wrote this. It was what was in the safe. She’s real.” I never thought I’d need to convince him of this. But the note proved she was real. “The code to the safe was Nash. It all revolves around her.”

He stared at me and then lifted the note out of my hands.

I wished I had gotten the box and the other note. It would be hard to find again. But I could try to retrace my steps from last night. Ben would know what to do. I watched him reading the letter. Figuring stuff out like this was his job. He’d clear all this up in a flash.

Ben shook his head and looked back up to me. “This is a bunch of nonsense. There’s nothing coherent in this note. It’s just riddles.”

“I know. She’s trying to mess with my head. Don’t you see? And I know she just moved. My husband told me she did. She’s in Florida. We can find her.”

“Addy, I didn’t just talk to the owners of the neighboring practices. I talked to receptionists and even patients. There’s no way they were all paid off. So I started digging…”

“Of course they were paid off. It’s the only thing that makes sense!”

“Addy, I need you to sit down for a moment, alright?”

“Why?” I could feel a headache coming on. “She’s real, Ben.” I couldn’t make myself sit down. “She’s real.”

“I'm not saying that Dr. Nash wasn’t real.”

I heard the past tense and my body felt like it was shutting down. I somehow managed to sit down before I fell to the ground.

“I’m saying that she hasn’t been alive for over 4 years. And she was never located here. She was from New York City. Whoever you’ve been going to see was posing as her. Your husband must have hired someone to play a role.”

“There are probably a lot of Dr. Nash’s. Maybe you just found the wrong one.”

“No. She had the same letterhead as the Dr. Nash in your files.” He opened up a box on the floor. It was one of the ones from the basement.

“I asked you not to look through those, Ben.” It felt like my throat was constricting. How was I supposed to trust him when he did the opposite of what I asked him to?

“These files are dated from when she started her practice, up until today,” he said, ignoring me. “The files before her death have an address in New York City.” He opened one up and showed it to me. “The files after her death have an address here.” He showed me one of those too. “You don’t appear in any of the files when she was actually alive. Only once she passed away. Addy, your basement is filled with files from a dead psychologist. Which is odd, because her offices burned down. She died in that fire too. So why do you think you have files that had apparently burned in the fire that killed her?”

“I have no idea.” I lifted one up. Betty Ann Tompkins was written at the top. “They’re not all about me?” I looked up at him.

“No.” He sat down across from me. “And the ones about you aren’t real.”

I had an unsettling feeling in my stomach. “Ben, I don’t know. I was definitely seeing someone. They prescribed me drugs…”

&n

bsp; “I believe you. But you weren’t seeing Dr. Nash. And there’s a link here. Clearly your husband killed Dr. Nash. And what if some of his targets are people in these files? There’s too many for me to sort through, but I’m having some people pick them up to analyze. This could be the missing link.”

“Ben, I don’t think that’s a good idea. If my husband sees that they’re missing…”

“This could be what puts him away. He won’t even get a chance to see that they’re gone. We’ll arrest him before he even steps foot back in this house.”

“You really think there’s a link?”

“Why kill Dr. Nash and steal the files if there isn’t? He’s called The Doctor because we thought he was posing as a psychologist. He’s been using her name. And he could have been finding his targets with those files. They’re all mentally ill just like the victims and they…”

“You’re not necessarily mentally ill for going to a psychologist, Ben. Some people just need someone to talk to. Others are abused.” I could feel tears welling in my eyes.

He sat down next to me and grabbed my face in his hand. “I know, Addy. I’m sorry.” He wiped away my tears with his thumbs.

“For years I wished I had someone to talk to. Someone that was on my side.”

“I know.” He placed a soft kiss on my forehead. “Now you have me.”

God it felt good to have his hands on me. I felt calmer as soon as his skin touched mine. “But you’re right. Some of them probably are mentally ill.”

---