Gauguin Connection, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

spoke.”
    “Since Tuesday?” He shook his head as if he had received a hard blow to his skull. “You have been here for the last two days.”
    The ten-year-old girl in me, being berated by her embarrassed mother, threatened to hang her head in shame. Fortunately, decades of discipline came to the fore. I straightened my shoulders and blinked slowly. “I lost track of time.”
    “It seems a bit more than that.” He dragged a chair closer and sat down far enough from me to make me wonder if he was respecting my personal space or whether I smelled like I had locked myself in the same room for the last forty-eight hours. I looked at my usually immaculate workspace and could understand the frown marring Phillip’s face.
    The long desk was covered in over a dozen coffee mugs, chocolate wrappers and crumpled sheets of paper. I took a bracing breath before I could look down at my outfit. My white silk shirt looked like it had been lying at the bottom of the laundry bin for a week. A few stray coffee drops had stained my light green skirt. I didn’t even want to think about the unattractive mascara rings that undoubtedly were lying under my eyes. Not once in my adult life had I allowed myself to reach this point. I pushed away the shame to make place for self-aimed anger.
    “I need to clean up.” How had I failed myself twice in so many days? First the episode with the photo and now this. It was unacceptable.
    “That can wait. Tell me what’s happening with you.”
    “Do I have to?”
    “Please.”
    I really didn’t want to. The sincere concern pulling at Phillip’s face was the only reason I even considered telling him. He had been the first person in my life who cared to understand me instead of trying to change me. I closed my eyes for a long moment until I found the courage to look at him. “I used to be like this all the time until I was about ten years old. I would get interested in something and completely lose touch with reality. It is called hyperfocus. I would just focus on my new favourite topic and nothing else existed. My nannies didn’t know what to do, and since it kept me quiet they didn’t try to get me out of this zone. It was only when my mother found out that there was hell to pay.” And there hell to pay. Every time.
    “But it stopped when you were ten?”
    “Yes. That was when I… are you sure you want to hear this?” It was boring and irrelevant to all the interesting things I had discovered.
    “Yes, please.”
    “Fine. I was ten when my parents had another one of their diplomatic dinners. It was one of my better days and I was observing everyone. That was when I realised how everyone was acting falsely and lying with almost every word that left their mouths. I decided that if that was what it took to get my parents’ approval, I would learn to pretend just like everyone else. It wasn’t difficult to imitate everyone’s behaviour. It was a game for me, something that I considered a challenge and fun. Soon my parents thought that I had grown out of whatever it was that had ailed me before. What they didn’t realise was that I was no longer myself. I was them, their friends, everyone else but me.”
    Phillip shook his head in anger like he had the only other time that I had told him about my childhood. “And that is why you studied psychology, body language and all of that.”
    “Yes. That helped me understand why people had such a need to pretend. Why people were so good at it.”
    “And now you know how to behave like everyone else.”
    “Oh, I mastered that skill long before I graduated. It makes people more comfortable. It’s simpler.” And I hated it.
    “So why don’t you behave like that around me?”
    I thought about it. “You don’t need me to be like you.”
    My answer seemed to surprise Phillip, but he quickly recovered. “I do, however, need you to go home and rest.”
    I barely refrained from uttering a self-berating grunt. “I will. But first I have to show