The Undivided by Jennifer Fallon Page A

Ren could bluff his way out of this.
    ‘Christ,’ he said, standing up and taking a step back from the counter. ‘You’re a fucking pervert.’
    Murray was not impressed. ‘Don’t try that on with me, Ren.’
    ‘Is that how you get your kicks, you sick bastard?’ he asked, feigning disgust. ‘By molesting the poor defenceless kids in your care?’
    ‘Ren,’ Murray warned. ‘Stop it.’
    ‘Stop what? Exposing you for what you really are, you dirty old man?’
    Murray maintained an admirable air of serenity in the face of Ren’s ludicrous accusation. ‘This is just your way of acting out. Calm down.’
    ‘Calm down!’ Ren yelled, getting right into the moment. After all, his mother was an award-winning actress. A lifetime spent on film sets surrounded by the greatest directors of this generation had taught Ren a thing or two about being dramatic. He raised his voice even louder. ‘I will not calm down! You’re disgusting. And I’m not taking my clothes off for you! I don’t care what you threaten me with!’
    As he’d hoped it would, his yelling brought Kiva running into the kitchen. She wasn’t looking nearly so immaculate this afternoon. She was barefoot, wearing a roughly tied blue silk bathrobe over her nightdress. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was mussed and stiff and pointing in several odd directions.
    ‘Ren? What’s the matter?’ she asked, looking back and forth between him and the psychiatrist. ‘What are you yelling about?’
    ‘You gotta save me, Mum!’ he cried. He hurried around the bench to put Kiva between him and Murray, as if he feared for his safety, even though he stood a head taller than Kiva and had done since he was fourteen. ‘This depraved bastard is trying to make me take my clothes off.’
    ‘Murray?’ Kiva asked, looking more perplexed than worried.
    ‘Pay no attention to Ren’s histrionics, Kiva,’ Murray said calmly. ‘He’s simply trying to divert attention from the fact that he’s cut himself again.’
    Bollocks , Ren thought. He knows.
    ‘All I did was ask Ren to remove his jacket,’ the shrink added, ‘so I could check his arms for injury.’
    Kiva turned to Ren, looking mortified. ‘Is that true, Ren? Did you cut yourself again?’
    ‘No,’ Ren replied adamantly — and quite honestly. Whatever wounds he was carrying, he hadn’t inflicted them on himself. He pushed his sleeves up and held out his bare forearms for examination. ‘There! You see! Not a mark.’
    ‘Kerry found blood on the light switch in your bathroom.’
    ‘I cut myself shaving,’ he said. ‘It happens. Even to people without low self-esteem.’
    Murray studied him closely for a moment from across the counter and then shook his head. ‘You don’t appear to have shaved this morning.’
    ‘How the fuck would you know?’
    ‘Ren! Stop this!’ Kiva exclaimed, her eyes welling up with tears. ‘Dear God, I don’t know where I went wrong with you!’
    ‘How about the day you pulled me out of that lake,’ Ren said, a little regretful that the comment would cut Kiva to the core. Deep down, he did love Kiva, and he knew that she, in her somewhat quirky way, loved him too. She didn’t deserve such cruel words, but he needed a legitimate reason to flee the kitchenbefore Murray decided he really must take off his jacket, and Ren’s greater lie was exposed.
    ‘He doesn’t mean that, Kiva,’ Murray said, calm as a frozen lake. ‘He’s just trying to hurt you to mask his own pain, isn’t that right, Ren?’
    ‘If it meant I didn’t have to deal with this sort of bullshit,’ Ren said, mostly to Murray Symes, who was the true focus of his immediate problem. ‘I reckon I might have been better off if Patrick had left me there to drown!’
    With that, Ren turned and stormed out of the room before Murray or Kiva could order him to stay, confident the discussion would no longer be about him. Murray Symes was going to have to spend the next hour or so consoling Kiva, and perhaps