The Unforgivable Fix Read Free

warning, but it didn’t seem as fierce. “Did that hawk get you?” She steadied herself on three points and reached her right hand toward the bird.
    The owl gave one last attempt at screeching her away before spreading its wings. One wing cooperated. Lydia extended her hand close enough to touch the other, hanging limp at the bird’s side. Warm blood dripped on her fingers. “You’re dying, little one. It’s me or nothing.”
    She tilted her head. The hawk was still circling above them, high enough to escape any retribution for the damage he’d done. She pulled her right hand back, unzipped her windbreaker, and returned to the owl, now drained of any resistance. Lydia tucked the owl inside her jacket, secured the zipper tight against her chin, and reached again for a steady hold on the cliff wall.
    “Don’t get feisty in there.” Lydia looked up to the edge of her backyard and resumed her climb. “Hang in there, buddy. Nobody’s dying today.”

Chapter 5
    O LYMPIA
    “I have somebody else who’s been telling me the same thing.” Lydia sipped warm cider from a paper cup. “He tells me it’s time to reengage.”
    Sharon Luther set her own cup on the empty space of the wooden bench the two women shared. “He’s right. There are too few clinical psychologists in Olympia.” Her grey eyes glistened in the light of the autumn afternoon. “I can click off the good ones with one hand and still have enough fingers left to flip my ex-husband the bird.” Her voice softened. “You’ve had rough times, Lydia. You know the best thing for you is to get back into life. It’s the only fix.”
    Lydia wondered what repairs Sharon thought she needed, then realized her injuries following her shooting had been well documented in the local media. But no one knew what she’d been up to in the months since. She looked across the broad boardwalk of Percival Landing to the narrow harbor filled with sailboats and tugs. Olympia’s west side climbed up a gentle hill of middle-class homes with million-dollar views. Her mind drifted to Maizie, the sweet child with the vile father she’d met while recuperating on Whidbey Island. She hoped the little girl was happy in Maine, surrounded by a view as lovely as the one Lydia had.
    “Bring me up to speed with what’s been happening with you,” she said. “It’s been, what? Two years since we’ve spoken?”
    Sharon shook her head. “That whole time thing. If you figure out a way to slow it down, share it with me first, will you?” She took another sip of cider. “The assholes in charge are still pushing me to take on more administrative duties, but I’ve successfully dodged all their ham-handed attempts to pull me out of the lab.”
    Sharon Luther was a professor at Evergreen State College. The nontraditional school had lured her away from Ohio State more than ten years earlier. She brought her international reputation as a memory researcher and several multimillion dollar grants with her, adding the credibility of hard-core science to the well-established liberal-arts status of the school. Her work broke new ground in how memories are encoded, stored, and retrieved that most wouldn’t expect to come out of a school with fewer than five thousand students. Lydia met her not long after she’d opened her practice in Olympia. Sharon had been soliciting potential research subjects for a study she was doing on the impact of postpartum depression on the memory of new mothers. Impressed with her professionalism, Lydia had recommended her study to several patients. She’d come to expect a visit from Sharon every year or so. New funding meant new research and a need for new folks to study.
    “I’m happy to report NIH keeps supporting my work at a respectable rate,” Sharon said. “It’s more than enough to satisfy the bureaujerks that I’m earning my keep.”
    “What are you working on now?”
    “Babies!” Her face glowed with an enthusiasm not often seen in tenured faculty.