14. Kai #2
Then she smiles faintly. “I overslept, my coffee machine died, and work was absolute chaos. Nothing particularly interesting unless malfunctioning kitchen appliances suddenly qualify as clinical events.”
Nothing interesting. The phrase lands with considerably more force than it should.
I make a note about work that I will probably never need to read again.
“And the rest of the week?”
“Better. Busy, but normal.”
Again, nothing. The clinical part of my brain immediately begins doing what it has been trained to do: observing the discrepancy between content and behavior, noticing the slight fatigue around her eyes and the moments when her attention briefly moves toward the window before returning to me.
Something happened. Obviously something happened.
I fucking happened. The only question is why she has chosen not to tell me.
There could be dozens of reasons. Perhaps she genuinely believes the letter is too insignificant to discuss.
Perhaps she is frightened enough that speaking about it aloud would make it feel more real.
Perhaps she intends to handle it privately or has already told Tessa, her mother or Nanna, or the police.
The last possibility should concern me considerably more than it does.
Instead, beneath every rational clinical observation, another voice moves quietly through me when Julia meets my gaze and deliberately keeps the letter to herself.
Good girl.
My fingers freeze around the pen in my hand.
The thought is so immediate, so possessive and so entirely divorced from anything Dr. Blackwood should feel toward the woman sitting across from him that I almost lose track of what she is saying.
I force myself back into the room. If she has reported the letter, there will be questions.
Perhaps cameras. Maybe police driving through the neighborhood or checking whether anyone saw something Sunday night.
The possibility enters my mind. I dismissed it within seconds.
That is what actually concerns me. Not the police, the ease with which I decide they are manageable.
I stare at the notepad long enough that the words on it blur slightly.
Yes. Transfer her. Immediately. And find someone willing to assess why a thirty-seven-year-old psychiatrist with a successful career has developed the self-preservation instincts of a rabid raccoon.
Julia shifts in the chair. “You okay?”
The irony of her asking me that almost makes me laugh.
I look up. “I’m fine.”
Her eyebrow rises. Apparently I deserved that.
“I walked directly into it.”
“You really did.” There is a little more of her usual warmth in the response, and I allow it to pull the session somewhere safer.
“Last week I asked you to pay attention to the point where someone else’s anticipated reaction enters a decision before your own opinion does. Did you notice anything?”
Julia’s expression changes in a way I have begun recognizing as the moment she realizes one of my questions is going to require more than the answer she obviously prepared on the drive here.
“More than I expected, actually.” She leans back, considering before she continues, and this time I let the silence remain hers.
“It isn’t always a specific person,” she says eventually.
“Sometimes it is. My mother is probably the easiest example because I can practically hear her. What she would say before I’ve even decided something.
But sometimes it’s just this general... calculation.
How inconvenient something will be for someone else.
Whether saying what I actually think is going to create a problem.
Whether whatever I want is worth somebody being disappointed. ”
“How often did you change what you wanted after noticing it?”
“Less than I thought I would.” A small crease forms between her brows. “Which was weird. Apparently just realizing I was doing it made some things easier to separate.”
I nod. “That was the point of the assignment.”
“I hate when you sound pleased with yourself.”
“I’m trying to contain it.” My tone comes out flat as always when I try to disguise the fact that I fucking love when she sounds bratty.
She looks at me for a second, and the humor fades naturally as her attention returns to whatever she has been thinking about.
“It made me think about boundaries differently too.”
I shift slightly in the chair. “How?”
Julia rubs her palms once over the denim covering her thighs before folding her hands together again.
“I always thought boundaries were mostly about saying no. You don’t want to do something, so you say no, and theoretically that should be the end of it.”
“Theoretically?” I invite the explanation.
Her gaze lowers. “Yes.”
There is something in the word that changes the room. Not dramatically. Julia doesn’t retreat, and there is no visible panic, but the ease she carried a few moments ago disappears around the edges.
I put the pen down because that catches my fucking attention. “What does “no” mean to you?”
She thinks about that for longer than I expect.
“Something very important,” she says quietly. “And something that doesn’t always mean very much.”
My attention sharpens more. “Those sound contradictory.”
“They are.”
She picks at the edge of one fingernail again before catching herself and flattening her hand against her thigh.
“No” is supposed to mean stop. We teach children that. Adults say it constantly. No is a complete sentence, boundaries matter, consent matters, all of that.” Her mouth twists slightly, but there is no humor in it. “Except sometimes you say it and nothing changes.”
There are moments in this job when experience identifies a direction before a patient provides enough information to confirm it. This is one of them. I don’t know exactly what happened. I know enough to feel something cold settle beneath my ribs.
“Are you talking about something that happened when you were growing up?”
Her gaze remains on her hands. “Kind of.”
I keep my voice measured. “You’ve talked about emotional abuse in your family and about your father being physically violent toward your mother. Was he ever physically abusive toward you?”
Julia’s head lifts quickly.
“No. Not like that.” She pauses and then corrects herself, because she has become more precise about these distinctions since coming here.
“He grabbed me a few times when he was angry. Mom slapped me more than once. There were maybe a couple of situations growing up where things threatened to get physical between us, but nothing like what he did to her.”
She looks away. “That isn’t what I mean.”
My jaw tightens before I can stop it. I relax it deliberately. “You don’t have to tell me anything you aren’t ready to tell me today, Julia.”
“I know.” The answer comes quickly enough that I believe her. “That isn’t why I’m hesitating.”
I wait. Her throat moves when she swallows.
“I was eighteen.”
There it is. Every instinct inside me changes direction at once. I remain exactly where I am.
“What happened?” The question comes out softer than I expect, and Julia looks at the window for several seconds before she begins.
“It was my birthday. There was a party, and this guy I knew offered to drive me home afterward. I wasn’t close to him, but I knew him enough that getting into his car didn’t feel stupid at the time.”
The last few words immediately tell me where some of her shame lives. I don’t interrupt.
“I’d had a couple of drinks, but not enough for how drunk I felt.
I didn’t understand that until later. At the time, I just thought maybe I hadn’t eaten enough or I was more tired than I realized.
” She pauses, her fingers curling slightly against the denim.
“Looking back, I think there’s a good chance he put something in my drink. ”
A violent heat moves through my chest. I keep my breathing even.
“He said he needed to stop at his place because he forgot something. It was supposedly on the way, and I didn’t think anything of it, so I went inside with him.” Her voice remains remarkably steady.
That frightens me more than tears would.
“The second we were through the door, he started kissing me. I remember trying to pull my face away and telling him I wanted to go home, but everything felt slow. My arms, my legs, even thinking about what I was supposed to do next felt like it was happening from somewhere far away.”
My mother’s vacant stare flashes through my mind. Julia after our second session. Different circumstances. Same nervous system trying to survive what it cannot escape.
“He kept moving me backward while he was kissing me, and by the time I understood where we were going, we were already in the bedroom. He pushed me onto the bed.”
I feel my hand tighten around the arm of my chair. Julia doesn’t notice because she is reliving the experience but with a sort of detachment that feels more as a memory, than a nightmare.
“I told him no.” The word is quieter than everything before it.
“I remember that part very clearly. I said it more than once. I said, ‘Please, no. It hurts. No.’ I wasn’t screaming, and I wasn’t hitting him because I barely felt like I was inside my body anymore.
My limbs were heavy and I couldn’t seem to make them do what I wanted. ”
She draws in a careful breath. “He kept telling me to relax. He said it would be over soon.”
Something inside my skull goes very quiet.
Not calm, nothing about what I am feeling resembles calm.
I want his name. I want to know whether he still lives in Minnesota.
I want to know whether he has spent the last sixteen years waking up every morning convinced that what happened in that bedroom became irrelevant simply because the woman he raped went home afterward and never came back.
The thought that follows belongs entirely to the part of me that watches Julia from the trees.
Find him.