Free Eric's Edge by Holley Trent Page B

see if there’s a chance for a relationship be weak?”
    “My mother taught me to believe that I don’t need them. That I don’t need anyone except me and her, and less her , obviously, now that I’m past quarter-life.”
    That didn’t sit right with him. The mysterious Ms. Weisz has to have been hiding some things. Eric kept that suspicion to himself, though. He’d keep his aggressive queries at bay until Maria had said all she was going to say. She was talking. He wanted more than anything to hear it all—not just because he wanted to know her, but she needed to say it. Maybe if she spoke those words and heard them from her mouth, she’d process her circumstances in a different way. She’d see that it needed to be discussed, and further—that maybe there were things she could do to fix the way she felt.
    “You can’t fix things in the dark,” his grandmother used to say.
    He considered asking Astrid to put that on a cross-stitch hanging with maybe some bats and owls and shit. He’d staple it in front of Maria’s desk at the Shrew office in Durham and install a spotlight beneath it.
    Maybe if she looked at it enough, she’d take the sentiment to heart.
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Usually when Maria thought about her estranged family members, she experienced an uncomfortable tension in her body in that Danger, danger! way that always made her back off the subject. She’d always thought that anxiety was her body’s way of telling her brain, “Hey, lady, something’s wrong with those people. Don’t waste your thoughts on them,” but for the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel that. If anything, she just felt confused—which wasn’t a station she particularly enjoyed dwelling in.
    “That’s weird,” she said softly.
    “What is?”
    “Oh. Nothing. I’m just…thinking.”
    “Feel free to do it aloud. It won’t bother me.”
    “That’s okay. I don’t want to bring down your mood.”
    “You’re an empath. Do I seem bothered to you?” He shot her a look and raised an eyebrow.
    She checked in with herself and opened herself up psychically to digest the energy he was putting off. It was pretty neutral, surprisingly.
    Huh .
    She didn’t try to make sense of it. She was just going to roll with it until he changed his mind and got bored with hearing her speak.
    She cleared her throat and leaned forward to turn on the radio. She wasn’t so much scanning the stations, limited though they were, as fiddling with the knobs. Stalling . Generally, she preferred having no background noise at all, even when she was meditating or practicing yoga. Sound sometimes stressed her out, but she needed there to be something competing with her for Eric’s attention—so the focus wasn’t entirely on her.
    “I think about my family in Jamaica a lot,” she admitted, staring out her window. There wasn’t much to see as they neared the turnpike. Just cars and a lot of asphalt and concrete.
    “Why did you stop visiting them?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. No one ever gave me a reason. It might have just been one of those things that fell through the cracks when there were other movements in my life. The last summer I went, I was thirteen or fourteen. Hard to keep track without having school grades as time references, but I know I was older than twelve. My mother and I had just moved again, and there wasn’t time for a trip that summer, and I guess, no money, either. She usually sent me on my own and my father’s family would collect me on the other end.”
    “Did you ever ask her to send you after that?”
    She shrugged again. “Conversations like that with my mother tended to be futile things. I’d broach one subject, and she’d move on to another so quickly that I couldn’t bridge a way back to what I wanted to talk about. I think after a while, I just let it drop. And then I got busy with that failed attempt at college and work and then…”
    “The Shrew Study.”
    “Yes.” She picked up the