Page 40 of The Therapist

TWENTY-SEVEN

Sandy

I am filled with glee as I watch what’s happening, watch what my screams, my schemes have produced.

He is filled with panic and I’m so excited to see it. He will get what’s coming to him. He will pay for trapping me in a banal existence with someone incapable of giving me what I needed.

I watch from the back of the garden, standing behind the thick trunk of a gum tree, protected by the darkness and wrapped in the wind, my body shivering with cold or excitement.

This is better than I could have ever hoped and I know that tomorrow, when this is all over, I will want to remember everything. I will want to savour it so that I can go over it in my mind again and again.

Come on, come on , I think as I watch her slightly shaking hand holding the gun.

Do it. Do it now.

I glance up at the house, see him watching from the window.

And then she yells that she is calling the police and I can feel it all unravelling. It can’t go wrong now. I have waited for this moment for too long, planned for it for too long.

‘No, Mike, don’t hurt her,’ he shouts down into the garden, his voice carrying the threat to the woman with the gun and the man fumbling with the lock, to my therapist, Lana, and ‘the husband’, Mike.

The hand holding the gun trembles with panic and then she does it, just like that.

She shoots him.

I want to leap out and announce myself but I know I need to stay hidden, that I need to savour this alone. Joy runs through me as I look up at the window of a bedroom and see him there, watching me, watching it all and then – he’s gone.