The Red Thread Read Online Free PDF Page A

looks, I am grateful to see someone actually buying a book from here. Too many people come in thinking they found just some random place to hang out. I hate how people don’t seem to buy books. They come in and peek through our books, but no one ever seems to buy them.
    My heart finally returns to a normal pace as the door closes and the quiet man with the beautiful eyes is gone. Laurie turns toward me, and she has a wide smile.
    “He was just so….” Even she can’t find the words.
    “Yeah” is all I manage to respond.
     
     
    THE DAY goes by in a blur, and yet that strange, silent man never leaves my mind. When I walk home, I lay my hoodie and messenger bag on my bed. I eat and then I get into the car with my father, who got home from work right before dinner. It’s Wednesday night, which means it’s therapy night. Most people go out drinking at night, and I go to the doctor on Wednesday. I know how to party.
    Dad waits in the waiting room with the newest mystery crime novel he is reading. They’re his guilty pleasures. No matter how bad they are, he eats them up like dessert.
    In my doctor’s office I sit down on the sofa in front of Dr. Barbara Wheeler, an older woman in her midfifties, with her jet-black hair tied back in a neatly tied bun. Not a hair is out of place. She wears a light gray sweater with a long floral skirt. With her cheekbones and good complexion, she is one of those women who you know was beautiful in their day.
    “How were you this week, Jess?” she speaks with a slight English accent.
    “I was okay.”
    “Only okay?”
    “Yeah. For me, that is damn great.”
    My therapy isn’t like how it looks in all the movies. Dr. Wheeler doesn’t hold a notepad in her hands and take notes, nor does she put me under hypnosis. She just sits there and listens. For forty-five minutes, it’s all about me, and to say that is unnerving would be an absolute understatement. I can say I know what it’s like to be put under a microscope, because that’s what therapy is like. You are sitting there as a person you hardly know anything about studies you and analyzes you.
    “How is the medication affecting you? Is there any change in mood?”
    “It’s helped,” I respond. “This new medication made me a bit sick at first, but my body is getting used to the Prozac. It’s not affecting the Trazodone or my other meds.”
    “That’s good. Do you find that it is helping you more than the medication you were on before?”
    I shrug.
    “Is that a no?”
    “It’s about the same, I guess.”
    “So tell me about your thoughts and feelings for this week, Jess.”
    Dr. Wheeler speaks with a soft, caring voice. She is a good doctor, but I just have trouble communicating. I tell her what she wants to know, and the session comes to an end. I pay her with a check, and she tells me to have a good week. I tell her to as well. But when I walk back out into the waiting room, there he is.
    The beautiful stranger. Twice in one day?
    He looks up as I walk out, and he gives me the same lopsided, wide grin he gave me earlier today. He’s even holding the violin book in his lap. Our eyes meet, and it’s as if an electric charge is exchanged between the two of us. I don’t know if he feels it, but it’s sending jolts throughout every single one of my bones.
    “Ready to go, kiddo?” Dad asks, and I look over to him.
    I can’t find the words, so all I do is nod. The moment the stranger and I had is over. He looks back down toward his book, and I zip up my hoodie. Dr. Wheeler walks out of the door.
    “Adam Foster, you ready?”
    The young man looks up and nods, following Dr. Wheeler to the office.
    I watch as the door shuts behind him. I can now put a name to the stranger’s face. Adam Foster. I am overcome by two emotions: the desire to see him again but also the urgent need to never see his face again. Just seeing him is putting me through a whirlwind of emotion. Getting to know him might lead to my death. I was