28. Kai #3
The first night I followed you, I was worried about you.
You had left my office after dissociating, and when I saw your face through the windshield, I recognized something I had known long before I ever became a psychiatrist. My mother used to disappear like that after my father hurt her.
She could still move, still answer questions, still insist she was fine, while I knew she was somewhere I couldn’t reach.
You did not remind me of my mother. I need to emphasise that because I would hate for you to misunderstand it. It was the look. The way you told me you were fine while every instinct I had told me you weren’t.
“I followed you because I wanted to make sure you got home safely. You did. That should have been where it ended. It didn’t, and everything after that was my choice.
I watched when I had no right to watch. I returned when there was no reason to return.
I wrote the first letter because some part of me wanted you to know that somebody had noticed the things you worked so hard to hide, and then I kept writing because I liked the woman who began answering me.
By the time you opened that door, I had already crossed more lines than I could justify.
The fact that you wanted Ghost afterward does not erase the fact that I never gave you the information you needed to decide whether you would have wanted him if you knew he was me.
That is the betrayal I will have to live with.
There were a hundred moments when I could have stopped it. There were probably a hundred moments when I could have transferred your care and, much later, approached you honestly as myself if there was ever anything between us outside that room. I didn’t do that.
Part of that was because I knew transferring you would mean asking you to rebuild trust with another doctor when you had only just begun to trust me, and I told myself protecting your progress mattered.
The uglier truth is that I didn’t want to lose Thursdays.
And once you began wanting Ghost, I didn’t want to lose him either.
I kept thinking I would tell you. There was always some imaginary future night when I would take off the mask myself and finally give you the truth.
Then you would smile at me, or fall asleep against me, or call me Ghost in that voice that made me forget every sensible decision I had ever made, and I would tell myself I could have one more night before I destroyed it. That was cowardice.
You should never have had to recognize a tattoo and trap the truth out of me. My biggest regret, among many, is that I did not respect you enough to confess before you had to discover it yourself. Nothing I say can repair the trust I broke, and I will not insult you by asking you to forgive me.
I also will not come near your house again.
I will not ride past it, watch from the trees, appear somewhere you might be or ask anyone else to check on you for me.
Ghost ends with this letter. Your care with me has ended as well.
Mara will give you several options for another doctor and will handle any transfer you authorize.
You will not need to speak to me or see me for any part of it.
What happened between us does not erase the work you did in therapy.
Please believe that much, even if you never believe another word I say.
You were the one who learned to say no without apologizing.
You were the one who stopped making every other person’s feelings your responsibility.
You were the one who started asking what you wanted, even when the answer frightened you.
I may have been sitting across from you while you did those things, but they belong entirely to you.
So does the boundary you gave me today. I will respect it.
I hope someday you can remember some part of what we had without feeling as though all of it was contaminated by what I did.
I hope you find someone you can trust without having to wonder what they are hiding from you.
More than anything, I hope I have not taken away the part of you that had finally begun believing trust could be safe. I am so fucking sorry if I have.
You once asked whether I would ever let you see me. I wish I had understood then that the mask was never the thing keeping you from doing that.
Goodbye, Little Ember.
—Kai
I read it twice. There are half a dozen sentences I want to change because they sound too much like an explanation, another three because they reveal things I have no right to place on her shoulders now, but eventually I understand there is no version of this letter that makes me feel better without asking Julia to carry some part of my guilt for me. That is not what it is for.
I fold the pages and slide them into an envelope. For the first time, I write Julia Hayes on the front instead of Little Ember. The name hurts more.
I seal it, put her address beneath it and place it beside my keys. I’m not taking the bike, won’t drive to her street. I’ll put it in the outgoing mail downstairs and let a stranger carry the last words I am ever going to send her.
This entire situation leaves a hollow ache beneath my sternum that seems to spread slowly through the rest of me.
There will be no lamp tonight. No black envelope waiting for me to imagine her opening.
No unlocked door, no sleeping beside her until her breathing deepens and leaving before daylight can expose what I was too much of a coward to show her.
Ghost is over. Dr. Blackwood is no longer hers either.
All that remains is Kai, sitting alone behind a desk with a report already on its way to the Board, an appointment request sitting in another psychiatrist’s inbox and a goodbye letter addressed to the woman whose trust he managed to destroy while convincing himself he was protecting it.
For once, there is nothing left for me to fix. Only dealing with consequences I have finally decided not to run from.