Bodyguard of Lies by Bob Mayer

young and small, very inoffensive looking. The only immediate acknowledgement he made of her presence was to hand her a Kleenex and shut the door behind her.
    As soon as they were both seated, he spoke. “You mentioned something about having problems with John?”
    Right to the matter. Hannah liked that. It almost made up for his brief advice on the phone to follow her routine that had not worked well. She closed her eyes and thought for a moment how easy it would be to just sit here and have that voice explain everything. To tell all her secrets and then have them interpreted and fed back in a way she could handle. She’d told Jenkins a lot about herself over the last several years, but his feedback had been minimal. Since her life had been on a reasonably pleasant cruise control, Hannah had had no desire to press him for anything.
    “He’s gone. I assume I drove him away.”
    “You forced him to do what he did?”
    “I know what you’re doing,” Hannah countered. “If I had been more aware I would have been able to do something prior to his leaving. Made things better somehow.”
    “How do you know he wouldn’t have left no matter what you did?”
    She looked at him and thought briefly about what he had just said. “Doctor Jenkins, I know you want to help me but I don’t think I can do this. I—“
    “Did your husband say or do anything to you that indicated he was getting ready to leave you?”
    She thought shrinks weren’t supposed to interrupt. “No.”
    “Did he tell you he was unhappy?”
    “No.”
    Jenkins was matter of fact about it. “Sounds as if your husband made a conscious decision to leave and it might well have nothing to do with you. Why do you feel responsible?”
    “He wouldn’t have left if he had been happy with me.”
    “Were you happy with him?”
    Touché, Hannah thought, but didn’t respond.
    Jenkins shifted his angle of approach. “Tell me exactly what has happened since we last met.”
    Hannah relayed the events, completely, for the first time to another person starting with waving bye to John as he headed off to golf. She wound up with the meeting with Brumley. It took her most of the allotted time for the session.
    Jenkins had his hands folded neatly in his lap as he finally spoke, but through her own fog of emotions, Hannah was surprised to sense that Jenkins seemed nervous.
    “Do you feel suicidal?”
    “No.” Hannah remembered the knife and the tub. “Yes.”
    A single eyebrow went up and Jenkins waited.
    “I play with a knife sometimes.”
    “Is this something new?”
    “No.”
    Jenkins waited, probably wondering why she’d never told him this before she knew. Finally he gave in. “Ever cut yourself when you play with the knife?”
    “No.”
    “Why do you do it?”
    Finally the open-ended question, Hannah thought. She’d been a bit disappointed with Jenkins for a few moments there. “I think there’s a part of me that I want to get rid of.”
    “And what part is that?”
    Hannah shrugged. “The bad part.”
    Jenkins was probably remembering that silence didn’t work well with her. “What do you think is the bad part of you?”
    “The part that allowed me to end up in the situation I’m in right now. I should have known better.”
    “Known better than what?”
    “To entrust my life to someone else. It never worked as a child, I don’t know why I thought it would as an adult. I suppose I took the easy way and it’s turned out to be the hard way.”
    “Other than that bad part, though, do you have a desire to hurt yourself?”
    “No.”
    “And if you get rid of that part of you?” Jenkins asked.
    “Then I can control me.”
    “And?”
    Hannah’s eyes flashed with anger as she looked at Jenkins. “You don’t think I can control myself?”
    Jenkins spread his hands wide, a giving up gesture. “That’s not my province. I think you have great un-tapped potential.”
    She laughed bitterly. “Like a newly discovered oil field? That’s the