The Hero Next Time: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 4)

Chapter One: Lauren, Friday

Session one.

"So, let me see if I can wrap my mind around your arrangement." Penny Watson, the marriage counsellor Joe and Lauren had settled on, removed her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. Joe had wanted the counsellor to be a woman, thinking she would be more sympathetic to the unorthodox nature of their problem, but Penny seemed to be struggling with this, and Lauren thought marriage counsellors would have heard everything in their line of work.

"Did you want me to go over it again?" Lauren asked.

"No, no, I need to unpack this myself," Penny said, waving her glasses dramatically, and maybe a bit unnecessarily in Lauren's opinion. Penny seemed to be playing the part of an actor playing the part of a therapist. Lauren thought her ilk were supposed to be calmer, softer-spoken, conciliatory. Penny was abrupt, loud, and not reassuring at all. 

Lauren should have done more research on her before they'd booked this first appointment, but she'd been so busy that she'd had no time at all for more off the desk work, and she'd just been so happy Joe had made the effort to look up counsellors that she'd accepted his first suggestion. She thought ruefully that Joe must have just Googled "marriage counsellors near me" and picked the first female in the search results. Research was not his line of work; he owned a construction company with his brother Johnny. This really should have been Lauren's responsibility, but she had the kids to look after as well as her own work as partner at Justiciar Security and Investigative Services; in fact, her mind was only partly in the present with this session. The rest of it was already in the future, a later appointment meeting a new and very lucrative client. It made her feel a little guilty, because her actions were the reason they were here in the first place.

Penny sighed and put her glasses back on. She even had the glamorous look of a movie star; Lauren was reminded of Sandra Bullock when she looked at her, and tried to remember if the star of Speed had ever played a therapist in a movie. Lauren loved Speed. Something about Sandra Bullock in that movie had stirred her in a way she'd never expected, reigniting her interest in sassy, capable women, an interest that had finally been consummated when Rachel had reunited with her a few years ago.

"Okay, so the two of you have been married about twenty... no, twenty-one years," Penny said, reading off her yellow legal pad as if it were a script.

"That's right," Joe said, ever the expansive one, Lauren thought with a smirk. The man had hardly said anything the entire time they'd been here, sitting on the couch together, holding hands, which gave Lauren a bit of hope, even if it was in solidarity against the scary stranger rather than affection with each other. This was the most touch she'd gotten from him in months.

The couch was really a love seat, especially with Joe filling it. The nearly seven-foot, three-hundred-pound former high school defensive tackle always took up the bulk of whatever space he entered, and it was fortunate that Lauren, with five feet barely in her rear view mirror, could occupy the empty spaces he left behind. If she were taller she might have felt irritated about her husband's size, but Joanie was almost as tall as he was and she didn't seem to have any complaints, except for the bed situation, Joanie had once confessed to her; Joanie talked to her more than Joe did, now, and it broke Lauren's heart to realize that.

"And for nineteen of those years," Penny went on, once she realized Joe wasn't going to say anything more; the woman seemed to be as intimidated by Joe as they were with her, because she winced microscopically as she said the next part. "You were happily committed only to each other. Then you reunited with some friends you used to know when you were both kids growing up in Queensborough."

"Yes," Lauren said. "First Sunny back in 2005, then Rachel and Al in 2009."

"And two of those friends, Rachel and Al, after you reunited, took up with each other and eventually married." Penny squinted through her glasses at what she'd written in her pad. "Their getting married didn't stand in the way of you, Lauren, beginning an affair with Rachel."