Matter-of-factly, he said, “This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to resume your normal life and I’ll delay them. I really don’t think they have a case here but it doesn’t hurt for you to show that you’re well past the trouble you had during and after college. We’ll file a motion to force her to relinquish control of your funds.”

Linda nodded. “You must hear this a million times a day but the trouble I’ve had all goes back to my mother. That sounds pathetically clichéd, I know.” She turned her head slightly to study him for the first time. He’d been a name on a local bar association list. He was older than she had first thought, perhaps in his late fifties.

“I hear that a lot, you’re right. I have two daughters, and no, I’d not have let anyone take out their lower ribs unless their lives depended on it.”

“My life didn’t depend on it. I think my mother thought hers did, though.” She stood abruptly and pulled her sweater up to reveal her midriff. Putting her hands on her waist, she pressed inward, slowly collapsing her waist to its smallest circumference. “It’s called a wasp waist. Not only does it create an enviable waistline, muscles in the buttocks are elongated and flattened, see?”

Crawdad—not so tiny in her estimation any longer—looked shocked more than anything else. “How small is your waist as a result?”

“My last pageant it corseted down to about sixteen inches. I stopped cinching it after that. I mean . . . that was when . . . it was a little bit after that when I went to the first institution.” She hadn’t told him much about the teenage episode with the bottle of pills because he’d said it wasn’t admissible in an adult’s competency hearing. “Fast forward to my second year at Yale Business School and I got smacked by a soccer ball just right and a point of bone left from the surgery perforated some of my innards. I developed an infection throughout my GI, lost forty pounds and was wasted for four months.” Sometimes she wondered if she might have been able to graduate and get her life together had that not happened.

But it had been too big a blow, not to be able to go back to the courses she’d liked and finish them. On top of that, the flashbacks on her childhood surgeries escalated into night terrors. She’d had nothing to build a normal life on. Dr. Kirkland had helped her at least become functional again.

What had she been thinking she could even offer Marissa? Marissa owned a business and was incredibly smart with statistics and computers. Linda had nothing, nothing at all to give.

“I’m really sorry for what you’ve been through,” Crawdad said, then looked surprised at himself. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“My therapist thinks I’m not crazy.” A new thought occurred to her, something she hadn’t told him. “Besides, this isn’t about my competence or even the money. It’s about me not talking. She offered me the whole deal before I took off last time.”