Free The Good Listener by B. M. Hardin

the car.
    Driving past my turn to my house, I kept driving so that they didn’t follow me home.
    I waited at the stop light.
    I tried to see the person’s face, but they were wearing sunglasses and a hoodie that covered their head.
    I was reminded of the person that had been hiding by the side of the building late that night and wondered if it was the same person.
    The light changed, and I signaled and turned right.
    And so did they. I didn’t recognize the car, but I had a feeling that maybe it had something to do with the strange roses that I was getting as well.
    I made a U-turn and just like I knew that they would, so did they.
    It was my early day.
    I’d finished my session with Blake, and I was on my way home. But now I was going elsewhere.
    I headed towards Joel’s job.
    Hopefully, someone would be outside just in case the person in the car tried something crazy.
    Just as I turned into the business park, the car stopped, dead in the middle of the road, turned around, and went the other way.
    Huh?
    Who was that?
    I drove to my husband’s building and sat there to try to figure out what had just happened.
    Had the driver known where I was going?
    What is it that they wanted with me?
    I immediately spotted Blake’s car and concluded that he had come straight back to work once we were done with our session.
    But looking around the parking lot, I noticed that Joel’s car wasn’t there.
    I called his cell phone, but he didn’t answer it.
    Instead of sitting, I headed back out of the business park, and cautiously checked my surroundings.
    I looked for the black sedan, and seeing that it was nowhere in sight, I sped off and headed home to see if Joel was there.
    But he wasn’t.
    Hmmm…
    Where was he?
    ~***~
    “You’ve had that nasty cough for a while. Maybe you should go get it checked out,” I suggested to Joel.
    “Yeah, I will. I will.”
    I’d told Joel about being followed the other day, but he didn’t seem to believe me.
    He thought that maybe I was thinking more of it than it actually was.
    He questioned why anyone would be following me in the first place.
    And when I asked him why he wasn’t at work, he simply said that he had taken a late lunch.
    He stated that he’d left his phone on his desk, which was his excuse for not answering his phone but he was lying.
    Joel never went anywhere without his phone.
    But instead of causing an argument, I let the conversation go.
    We were out for dinner and so far, thankfully, we were having an amazing time.
    “I have something for you,” Joel said and pulled out a folded piece of paper from his pocket.
    It was a picture of a newborn baby boy.
    “What’s this?
    “I was hoping that it could be our son. I know we discussed you actually carrying a baby with a donor, and you still can, but we can start with him. We can have a house full of kids if you want to. The mother signed over the rights at birth, and the father passed away only months before. I’ve been in contact with the agency. We can start the adoption process, and he can be all ours in no time. What do you say? Let’s make this happen.”
    Joel sounded so excited, and I didn’t want to disappoint him.
    But I still had a lot on my plate, and way too much on my mind.
    I couldn’t tell him that his boss was a lunatic, who I was trying to stop from killing someone else.
    And I wasn’t sure what fantasy world Joel was living in, but our marriage was still up and down.
    Of course, I could probably fix that if I cut down on my hours at work but I couldn’t do that.
    Not right now.
    And not anytime soon.
    “Say something. This is actually why I was on that late lunch the other day. I was at the agency. I know we should have gone together, but as I started to think about my life and about what we were missing, I kept coming to the same conclusion. We’re missing children. I want a baby Hannah.”
    “I want a baby more than anything in the world to Joel but,”
    “But what?”
    “I just think that