Her voice disintegrated, but she held the splintered bits together and managed to say it. “He said I was image all the way down.”
Haven’s heart beat hard and her stomach clenched around the hollow space that she’d envisioned inside herself ever since Porter had said that.
“Oh, hon,” said Elisa, so kindly, so gently. “And that’s what you’ve been so afraid of? That any guy who’s worth anything will think you’re image all the way down? Hav, you know that’s not the truth, don’t you, sweetheart?”
Something rose like a tide in Haven’s chest, and her eyes welled with the held-back pressure.
“You’re as real inside as that poet, hon. More real, because if anyone was a shallow asshole, he was.”
Haven’s laugh was almost a whimper.
“But Mark’s not like that guy, right?” It wasn’t quite a question the way Elisa said it, reassuring and even. “He already knows who you are and he hasn’t run away.”
That was what it took to break her down. Haven cried gallons of sloppy tears that required almost a whole box of tissues, which Elisa dispensed one by one until Haven subsided to small, ugly hiccups.
She looked at Elisa, who was sitting close, her face so sweetly sympathetic it made Haven want to start crying again.
“He hasn’t run away,” Haven agreed. “I did that for him.”
* * *
“I WAS WONDERING when you’d show up here,” Elisa Henderson told Mark.
“I looked you up on the internet.”
“Glad to know my business is easy to find.” She smiled at him. She was a tall, slim woman with gingerbread-colored hair. She possessed an overwhelming air of competence and the most sympathetic look in her greenish eyes. She leaned across her wide desk toward him and set her elbows on the surface as if settling in for a long story.
“Is this a conflict of interest?”
“No,” said Elisa. “I often work with two halves of a couple. Sometimes two of my clients turn out to be perfect for each other, and it would be sheer foolishness not to get them together.”
“But I’m not your client.”
“Well,” said Elisa. “I usually spend at least fifteen or twenty minutes talking to someone on the phone before they agree to sign a client agreement with me, and not all those conversations turn into business—although most of them do. So let’s just pretend this is a phone call. You’ve got me for fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“I don’t—I don’t even know why I’m here.”
“Most people come because they want to find someone.”
That made a peculiar, deep pain slide down inside his torso, as though he’d swallowed something too big for his body. “Do they ever come and say, ‘I found someone but it didn’t work out?’”
Elisa nodded. “Sometimes. Then usually I say, ‘Are you sure you mean it didn’t work out? Are you sure you don’t mean it hasn’t worked out yet?’ Because most of the time, these things are a work in progress.”
“I don’t think it can work out.”