“Yes, it’s fine.” She looks a tad green at the idea of choking down a glass of my fictional brown water. She wants to be my friend, but not that badly. “I should be heading out now. It’s a long drive back to the city.”

I nod. “Drive safely.”

She takes one last long look around my house. She’s probably wondering how much it cost me. In another life, Paige could have been a real estate agent. She has the right personality for it. Pushy as hell.

“Honestly,” she says, “you should think about getting some sort of security system for this place. I don’t want to come here one day and find you murdered in the living room.”

Statistically, the risk of such a thing is low. Less than a quarter of all homicide victims are female. Most of those women are young and low-income.

“Or get a boyfriend,” Paige adds with a laugh. “Like I said, happy to help on that front.”

Up to seventy percent of females who have been murdered are killed by an intimate partner. So in actuality, her suggestion to “get a boyfriend” is not only highly judgmental and insulting but would only increase my risk of meeting with a violent end. But I will not debate this woman.

“I’m really fine,” I say again. “I don’t need a security system.”

She considers this for a moment then snorts. “Yeah, that’s right. You invite the crazies right in, don’t you?”

It hits me now. I don’t know how I never saw it. Paige doesn’t respect what I do. She has been my advocate through two publications, and in her defense, she’s damn good at it. But she doesn’t believe in any of it. To her, the people I help are a bunch of “crazies.”

During the five years I have known Paige, she has insulted my home and my lifestyle choices, and she’s been the harshest critic of my manuscripts. I have taken every bit of her abuse because she’s good at what she does. But today, she has crossed a line.

Nobody talks about my patients that way.

“Paige.” I tap the corner of my right eye. “You’ve got a bit of mascara caked right here.”

“Oh!” Her black eyelashes flutter as her hand flies self-consciously to her eyes. She automatically reaches into her purse to search for a compact, but in the process, her phone slips from her left hand and clatters loudly to the wood floor. “Shit…”

She scoops up her phone—there’s a spiderweb of cracks imprinted on the screen. She looks like she’s going to burst into tears.

“Oh, dear,” I say. “It looks like your phone got cracked.”