Burning Time by Glass Leslie

Author:Glass, Leslie [Glass, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2011-01-26T06:00:00+00:00

38

The lights were off, and Jason was not in the apartment when Emma returned from her long lunch with Ronnie. There was no sign that he had been there, and no messages from anybody on her answering machine. That was strange. Usually there were three or four. She wondered if it had stopped recording again. Sometimes it did that for a day or two. The heads or something got stuck. She took off her jacket and, with her heart pounding, she started going through the stack of mail she had picked up on the way in. She knew she was doing this to take her pulse, to see if she was all right. There hadn’t been one of those letters in the mail for three days and she was afraid to hope there would be no more.

Because of their two addresses in the building, mail was a little confusing. Some of it was put on a table outside Jason’s office door, and some of it was left on the mat outside their apartment a few steps away. That day Jason’s mail, the thick pile of envelopes, checks from patients, correspondence, books and periodicals, was still on the table. If he had come home, he would have gone into his office taking it with him. There were only bills, no personal letters to Emma in her and Jason’s joint mail. Not a sound came from the other side of the wall where his office was. She was still not all right.

A profound sense of aloneness overwhelmed her. The silence in the apartment was even more unnerving than the menacing sights and sirens on the street below. She was upset that Jason wasn’t there spying on her after all, and wondered if the creepy sensation she’d had outside, of being watched and followed around, was her own wish that he really had come back.

She shook her head. The truth was Jason wouldn’t take time off to spy on her. Time was everything to him. A lawyer could work at home, could work at the office when the client wasn’t there, would bill more hours than there are in a day, and no one could ever know. Heart surgeons could charge ten thousand dollars a day, could set their fee at whatever someone was willing to pay for a life. But a psychiatrist had only a few forty-five-minute periods in a day. And someone like Jason, who wrote and spoke, and did research, had to give away the price of every hour he spent on scholarship.

He didn’t waste his time without a good reason, and rarely had any for her anymore. It was a gift he used to give her, but not anymore. He was so involved with his work he didn’t enjoy the few occasions he had to cancel his evening patients to go see her in a play. For an opening night in Philadelphia, he had to miss much of the afternoon as well; he’d complained about it the next day.

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