Chapter 20 The Show Goes On #2
"Baby, listen to me for a second." Her voice was gentle but direct.
"I'm gonna say something you're not gonna like, but I'm too old to dance around it…
You need to talk to someone. Losing control of your body, losing someone you care about, carrying all of that alone?
" She shook her head. "That's too much for one person, Catherine. And we both know you're not fine."
"I am fine."
Mary just looked at her.
"I am," Catherine said, with slightly less conviction. "It happened months ago. I've dealt with it and moved on. I'm fine, and I'm happy for Theodora."
The words sat heavily between them. Mary let them... For all of five seconds.
"You can't keep avoiding everything that scares you," she said finally. "Josiah got me seeing a therapist after my Robert died.” She reached across and covered Catherine's hand with her own. "You know what I learned? Fear gets smaller when you stop feeding it."
Catherine's eyes burned as Mary's hand remained on hers, steady and warm.
Mary squeezed her hand. "You're human, baby.
Bodies fail sometimes. Brains misfire. We make mistakes.
That doesn't make you less worthy of love, it makes you like everyone else who's ever lived.
" She paused. "Did you not hear me say she still asks about you?
A lot, actually. I don't know everything that went on between you two, but I know you were friends long before any of it.
And losing a friend is its own kind of grief.
Just as hard as losing a partner. Harder, maybe, when they're the same person. "
Catherine didn't answer. But she stayed for another hour.
When Mary finally hugged her at the door, it was the fierce, quick kind that had become familiar over months of these dinners. Catherine walked the short distance back to her own apartment, unlocked the door, and stepped inside.
The click of it closing echoed in the emptiness.
Catherine moved through her evening routine. By the time she reached the bathroom, she was bone tired. Not sleepy. Just worn through in the way of days that required more than they gave.
She cranked the faucet handle, the pipes groaning before hot water gushed out. Steam billowed up, clouding the mirror until her reflection blurred into a ghost. She yanked open the cabinet, and as she reached for her cleanser, her elbow knocked something loose.
The note.
It detached and plummeted. Time fractured. The yellow square hung suspended for a heartbeat, then another, before slapping against the water's surface.
Catherine's breath stopped in her throat as she watched it happen—that terrible, stretched moment between witnessing catastrophe and feeling it slam into you.
She grabbed for it. Her fingers stinging as she dove into the hot water, but she knew, even as she reached, that she was too late.
The ink had already started to go, the words pulling apart, bleeding outward, the T in Thank smearing first and then the rest of it, and the signature, which she'd looked at probably a hundred times, was just a shape with nothing behind it.
"No," she said, and then, because saying it once hadn't helped: "No, no, no, fuck!"
She lifted it as carefully as she could, but the paper was mushy and heavy, and it tore anyway, a piece slipping back into the water and sinking to the bottom. She stood there with what remained, the ink completely gone, and nothing left to read.
And then her heart did that thing.
She pressed her hand to her chest, fingers splayed.
Her first thought was heart attack, but there were no shooting pains.
Her second was seizure, so she stood very still, running through the checklist her neurologist had given her, waiting for something that didn't come.
No aura. No absence. Just her heart hammering against her ribs, her breath coming in shallow, and her hands gripping the edge of the basin.
Okay. So, a panic attack that just felt a lot like she was dying.
She hadn't had one since she'd woken up in a hospital bed after the Royal Albert Hall, lights too bright, the slow, terrible understanding of what had happened settling over her.
That had made sense. She'd lost everything that night.
Of course, her body had come apart. But she'd put herself back together since then. She'd been okay.
And now here she was, coming undone in her bathroom on a Thursday night over a sticky note.
She had others. That was the absurd part.
Dozens of them, folded between the pages of her copy of Persuasion.
But this one. This specific square of yellow paper, this handwriting, this goodbye—it was gone.
And her body apparently hadn't received the message that the scale of her reaction made absolutely no sense.
“Thursday,” she said out loud to the mirror.
Something Liv had told her before her first performance.
Say something true, something concrete, something that anchors you.
“It’s Thursday. I’m in my bathroom.” Her voice sounded off, like she was hearing it through something solid. Her heart wasn’t slowing.
Her hands had gone that buzzy, far-away feeling, and she grabbed the counter because she needed something solid under her palms. She was upright.
She was conscious. She told herself this.
You are standing in your bathroom, and you are okay.
She didn't entirely believe it, but she'd learned that sometimes you had to say things before they were true and wait for your body to catch up.
She lowered herself onto the toilet seat because she couldn't be certain her legs would hold her.
The floor looked fractionally off-level, so she pressed her palms flat against her thighs, focused on the feel of them, the solidity of her own legs underneath, and tried to breathe slowly enough to count. She lost it somewhere around four. Started over. Lost count. Started over again.
Her heart went hard, then softer, then hard again.
She sat there. She didn't know how long.
By the time she returned to herself, the sink was still running. She'd forgotten about the sink. She reached over and turned it off.
The note, well, what was left of it, still clung to the porcelain, pale and blank. No ink, no handwriting, no evidence of what had been there. She looked at it for a moment, then looked away.
She picked up her phone from the counter, holding it for a minute before unlocking it. The screen was bright in the dim bathroom as she squinted against the browser.
She knew what she needed to type. She'd known for a while, if she was honest with herself. She just hadn't been ready. Maybe there was no such thing as ready. Maybe it just had to be a bad enough night.
The name Liv had written down came back to her without effort. She supposed it had been there all along.
She typed slowly, like she was giving herself time to change her mind.
Florence Hardin Manhattan Therapist
She glanced at the yellow clumps of sticky note in the basin, then back at the screen. Then she pressed search.