Impostor Syndrome

Chapter 3: Jen and Liss

The girls were troubled, but they'd be okay. Will's parents, unlike her own, were stable, normal people. And despite the lurid details of her life she'd had to speak in court all those years ago, they'd always been kind to her. The girls would have been safe enough with her own mother, but...well, there was a reason she'd left as a teen. She hugged each of the girls and breathed a sigh that wasn't quite relief. Will's mother, Lianne, stood beside her.

"Is he on any medication?" she asked.

"Um, no," Anne said.

The older woman paused for a moment and then said, "I can't put my finger on it. He's not on any kind of mind-altering substance?"

They'd both stopped smoking weed well before the children and he'd given up alcohol over ten years ago. He'd never been an alcoholic, nor had be been an out-of-control drunk. But he had reasoned that while they'd had many a fun evening with it, he felt that part of his life was over and he just wanted to enjoy life with his family. "No," she told his mother.

Lianne shook her head. "Strangest feeling, like he's not my boy, you know? Maybe it's just the shock of you two having problems."

"Maybe," Anne said.

"Will" and Will's father returned. She wondered if he'd gotten the same feeling as his wife. If everyone who knew him well was noticing it, the impostor theory couldn't be that crazy, could it?

Crazy enough that she wasn't going to say it to them. Not yet. Not until she had proof. Recording device, she reminded herself. After I talk to Jen and Liss.

They said their goodbyes and she got into the car with Not-Will. They didn't speak on the way home. That was normal enough. What does it want? she wondered. It was okay having the girls away but not far. It wants to be able to access them. It hadn't made any demands of her and had only gotten aggressive after direct confrontation, immediately stopping when she'd given it a viable excuse. Was it even conscious? Did it have a goal or was it only behaving based on incomplete information fed to it? She wasn't sure which was more terrifying and that still didn't answer the question of where Will was.

He pulled into the driveway and they exited the car up to the house.

"So, are we going to talk?" he asked once inside.

She shook her head. "No, not today. I think we need to spend a day or two fully apart, really think about what we want, and then meet on neutral ground, and then try to come to some agreement."

He nodded. "All right, I'll go to a hotel."

"Actually, um–I mean, do whatever you want, obviously, but I'm going to go to Jen's."

He frowned. "If you think that's a good choice."

"Um..." Don't get confrontational. "I don't know what you mean by that."

He sighed. "You know how she is."

Will had never had an issue with her friends. But a lot of men do take issue with their intimate partners' friends. Was it filling in the blanks of Will's personality that it hadn't observed with common male behaviour? Or maybe it had recording devices in the house...

"She's supportive of me first, yeah, but I'm going to do what I think is best for the kids and me, regardless of what she says. Anyway, I'll be talking to Liss too."

"Hmph," he grunted. "I'll drive you over then. Just give me the directions."

Did it not know where she lived? Better to keep it that way as long as possible then.