Not Who We Expected by Lisa Black

Author:Lisa Black [Black, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2024-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

The story Ellie had told about her grandmother’s closet was true in essence. She and her cousins had played in it and occasionally had locked each other inside (until the one outside got bored), but never as a frightening thing. The closet was a delicious feast of the senses, a delight of touch and smell awakened in the absence of sight, a place to confide secrets and whisper plans.

Ellie had invented her terror, knowing a damn sight better than to tell Galen any real fear of hers. It had seemed a good bet that some experience like this could be lurking up the road in the name of “therapy.” Ellie might not be an expert in cults, but the research done for an earlier undercover job had warned her that gathering information about a convert to be used against them later on was a standard cult technique.

Of course, it was also a standard therapy technique—examining your childhood traumas and working through them. The possibility remained that Galen was, in a perhaps misguided way, trying to help her.

She was not yet sure of that.

But Ellie had decided one thing: if she wanted to get close enough for Devon to confide in her, Ellie had to get with the program. She had to stop arguing, stop resisting. She had to become the damn poster child for the success of Today’s Enlightenment.

And she had to make it convincing.

One more series of pounds and kicks hurt her toes and scraped the edges of her fists. One fist felt wet; the splinters must have drawn blood. She shouted, “Let me out!” as loudly and piteously as she could.

Galen’s voice, close, came through a gap in the wood. “Stop and think, Nell. No one is hurting you but you. You’re creating your own pain.”

“I can’t breathe,” she moaned, though she could.

“Yes you can. It’s not airtight. It’s just a box, Nell. Nothing is hurting you.”

Except the splinters and the bruises on her arms, where his goons had grabbed her, and the scrape on her head, where a piece of plywood had slammed into it, but yes, other than that, she was perfectly comfortable nail-gunned into a coffin.

“It’s only your thoughts that are harming you. It’s your thoughts that are keeping you locked into your fears like a jail cell. It’s a silly childhood experience that is curtailing your adult life. Do you want to keep giving it that power?”

His voice mesmerized with its soothing, steady cadence. And if Ellie really were claustrophobic, everything he said would make perfect sense. She stayed still and listened, wondering how long to wait before capitulating, and what she could say to make him, all of them, believe it.

“Tell me, Nell, do you want to give the memory of your cousin’s betrayal power over you?”

Again, she noted, he rephrased one’s experience in words designed to turn that one against family and friends. “No.”

“Do you want to give your ex-husband power over you?”

Get the gist. Get with the program. “No.”

“Do you want to give your absentee father power over you?”

“No.

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