Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Alec
The building holding Dr. Bennet’s office isn’t glamorous.
It’s one of those old brick structures in Capitol Hill that looks like it’s housed twelve different businesses over the last twenty years—architects, chiropractors, a weird tax guy who probably still uses a typewriter.
The kind of place you walk past a hundred times and never actually see.
But as soon as I’m inside, something in my lungs loosens. Not a lot. Just enough to keep me moving.
The hallway smells faintly of old carpet and eucalyptus from whatever candle his receptionist insists on burning. Her desk sits under a buzzing fluorescent light, a stack of neatly labeled folders beside her elbow. She looks up the second I enter.
“You can go right in, Mr. Horvath.”
I nod and head toward the half-open door at the end of the hallway.
Inside, the office is exactly how I remember it.
A soft gray rug. A sagging bookshelf against the wall, overflowing with titles about grief, attachment, trauma, and something called “radical empathy” that he once tried to make me read.
A small couch that looks deceptively comfortable but has a way of making you say shit you didn’t plan on saying.
And there he is.
Dr. Bennet stands from his chair, smoothing a hand down the front of his sweater vest because he’s precisely the kind of man who wears a sweater vest unironically. His hair is a little grayer than the last time I saw him. Or maybe I’m just noticing differently.
“Alec,” he says gently. “Come in. Please, sit.”
I do. The cushion dips under me just enough that I have to steady myself. My fingers lace together in my lap before I can stop them.
He settles into the armchair across from me, elbows on his knees, giving me his full attention. No clipboard. No pen. Just presence—calm, patient, infuriatingly grounded.
“Well,” he says after a moment, “last night you called about your loss. Please, tell me more.”
I swallow. The words claw at my throat. “My neighbor. Lina Lafferty.”
He nods slowly, encouraging me to continue.
“She wasn’t . . . family.” I stare at my hands. “But she mattered. Not just to me. To everyone in the building. She had this way of showing up when people didn’t know they needed someone.”
“You admired her.”
“I—” My jaw flexes. “Yeah. I guess I did.”
Silence stretches, it’s not tense, just . . . there.
“And this loss feels bigger than you expected,” he says.
A muscle in my neck tightens. “It feels wrong. Like I didn’t have the right to be hit this hard by it.”
He studies me for a moment. “Loss doesn’t ask permission, Alec. Also, sometimes we care more about some people than we want to admit.”
I exhale shakily. “I keep thinking . . . I was gone. And she died. And I didn’t know.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“That’s the thing.” I run a hand through my hair. “I keep pushing people out. Choosing to be alone so no one expects anything from me. And now she’s gone, and somehow it feels connected.”
“How so?”
I force myself to meet his eyes. “Her niece moved in. With a kid.”
“A child?” he repeats gently.
“Yeah. And they’re—” I breathe out. “They’re everything I’m not. Bright. Loud. Living.”
He tilts his head. “Does that scare you?”
“Terrifies me.”
“Because?”
I close my eyes, pressing the heel of my palm to my brow.
“Because they interrupt my day, the peace I’ve been able to find,” I whisper. “I don’t know how to . . . what if I lose all the work I’ve done because the noise is back?”
He looks at me puzzled.
“What noise are we talking about?” he asks.
“The public, the . . . it was a lot. All I wanted is to play music, not to be Alec Horvath,” I suddenly say, and there it is. The things you don’t know you’ll say until they’re out.
“We already talked about being ‘the Alec Horvath,’” he states and goes back into his notes. “You’re still you, and that person was just someone created by a marketing team and a man who wanted to sell your image to make himself rich.”
“You’re right,” I state, remembering what we’ve talked about.
This, all of this, started with me trying to figure out why I keep going to rehab. How upset I was at Connor fucking Dempsey. My agent and the man who introduced me to alcohol and ecstasy before I was eighteen. He used me. He promised the O’Sheas, my then foster parents, that he’d take care of me.
They kept cashing the checks. I don’t even know how they got away with it, but .
. . maybe that’s why Mara’s last name made so much noise.
I try not to think about my last foster family.
They were terrible people. This is why I’m suspicious of her.
What if she’s just trying to take something that doesn’t belong to her?
But there’s also that part where I don’t like to let people in. I did for too long and couldn’t keep them with me—or they disregarded me. Every time I tried growing close to somebody, the house changed. The rules changed. The people changed.
“It’ll be best if I don’t deal with them,” I conclude.
“Because you would hate if loss repeated itself.”
His question hits in a very unexpected way. Dr. Bennet waits, giving me space.
“And now,” I continue, voice thin, “there’s this woman next door. And her daughter. And they’re dealing with their own grief. And I can’t tell if I’m reacting to losing Lina or reacting to . . .”
I hesitate.
“. . . reacting to them.”
“You’re grieving multiple things at once,” he says softly.
“Lina’s passing. The childhood you lost before you understood it.
The connections you never felt safe having.
And now you’re confronting new people who represent what you’ve always avoided—connection, unpredictability, emotional vulnerability. ”
I let out a humorless laugh. “You make it sound so neat and tidy.”
“It’s not neat,” he says firmly. “It’s something so human it’ll be a challenge to confront.”
“I don’t want to get attached to them,” I say quickly.
“And yet?”
“And yet . . .” My voice trails off.
“And yet I stood in front of her earlier, and offered to help when I saw just a hint of panic in those big brown eyes of hers.” I shake my head. “It’s like some part of me wanted to make everything better. I hated it. Me . . . or whatever made me help her.”
Dr. Bennet’s mouth lifts—barely. “You’re afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of being seen.”
My pulse kicks. “I’m not—”
“You are,” he says gently. “And that’s okay.”
I look away, jaw tightening. “I don’t want to get attached to people who disappear. She’ll be gone in a year. She should pack now and leave before I get used to that joyful warmth.”
“So, fear.”
I open my mouth.
Close it.
He nods, as if that says everything.
“I don’t know what to do with all of this,” I finally admit. “Lina’s gone. The niece is here. The kid called me broken. Twice.”
“She sounds perceptive.”
“That terrifies me too.”
He chuckles softly. “She’s a child, Alec.”
“A child who notices things.”
“You noticed things as a child, too,” he says.
Sure, but if I ever made an observation I would either get kicked out, slapped, or . . . something. My lungs pull tight.
You noticed things as a child, too.
You learned to survive by noticing.
Then I regret telling Mara to leave that I’d pay.
Maybe her kid needs the stability I never had and living in Lina’s house is the way to do it.
And yeah, a part of me wonders what their situation is—if there’s a father somewhere, if there’s support.
Then I shut that thought down fast, because it’s none of my business.
And because caring about any of it feels dangerous.
It’s not my problem, and so I look up at him. “So what do I do?”
“You grieve,” he says. “You allow space for this loss. And for the fear underneath it. And maybe . . . you allow for the possibility that connection doesn’t always end the way you think it will.”
“I’m not ready.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“But she’s next door,” I mutter.
“Yes.” He nods. “And maybe that’s not a threat. Maybe it’s an invitation.”
I shake my head hard. “I can’t—”
“You don’t have to do anything today,” he says gently. “Just acknowledge that your grief and your fear are speaking loudly. And neither is wrong.”
I stare at the floor, jaw clenched.
“Come back tomorrow,” he says quietly.
I look up. “Tomorrow?”
“Yes. Let’s work through this. One day at a time.”
Something moves in me—small, fragile, terrified.
But it’s enough.
“Okay.” I stand too, my limbs stiff, my mind a mess of too many thoughts, too many emotions I don’t know how to categorize.
As I walk out of his office, the receptionist gives me a tiny smile. I nod back, though it feels clumsy, foreign.
Outside, the sky is a muted gray, the mist beginning again.
Seattle breathes around me, a whole city exhaling, alive in ways I still don’t know how to match.
I don’t know how to do any of this on my own without panicking or worrying I’ll lose everything I’ve scraped together these past few years.
Sure, it looks like I have my shit together—but some days, it feels like I’m right back at square one.
When does it get better?