Chapter 23
MAC
Sarah Delgado’s office was in a converted Victorian on the main street of Monroe, second floor, with a window that looked out over a parking lot and a row of Douglas firs.
The waiting room had the usual stuff—magazines nobody read, a water cooler, chairs designed for discomfort.
My appointment was at four-thirty, but I’d arrived twenty minutes early—my standard MO—and sat in one, bouncing my knee.
I cataloged exit routes out of habit. Front door, window, stairwell.
My phone buzzed.
Hey dad can I ask you something
His text felt like he’d been composing the question in his head for days and had finally worked up the nerve to send it. I recognized the pattern.
Always. Ask me anything.
Did you ever hurt me
The words hit me like a fucking round to the chest. I stared at the screen.
The waiting room hummed around me—the water cooler, the air conditioning, someone’s muffled voice through a closed door.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard, but my hand was steady.
The answer to this question was the one thing I was sure of.
No. Never. I never hurt you, Boden. Not physically.
But leaving hurt you. I know that. And I’m sorry for that every day.
Mom said you had an episode and hurt her. She said that’s why you left
Fay had told him. Some of it, at least. Enough for him to understand without carrying the full weight. I was grateful for her judgment and terrified of the conversation at the same time.
She’s right. I had a flashback in my sleep and I hurt your mom. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done. She wasn’t badly hurt but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t live with the possibility of it happening again. Of it happening to you.
So you left to protect me
Yes.
That’s stupid
I almost laughed at the bluntness of it, at the absolute, unfiltered teenage certainty that his father was an idiot.
Yeah. It was.
Like really stupid. You could’ve gotten help. You could’ve slept in a different room. You could’ve done literally anything other than disappear for five years
You’re right.
I’m not done
Okay.
I waited for you. Every day for like a year, I waited for you to come back. I told my friends you were deployed. I made up this whole story about how you were on a secret mission and couldn’t contact us.
My vision blurred. I blinked hard and the words swam and reformed.
And then I stopped waiting, and that was worse. Stopping was worse than waiting because at least waiting meant I still believed you’d come back
You broke something in me, Dad. I need you to know that.
I pressed my phone against my forehead. The screen was warm from my hand and the words were behind my eyes now, branded there. You broke something in me. My son. My boy. The kid I’d left to protect, and I’d broken him anyway, just in a different way.
I know I did. And I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn your trust back. I’m not going to ask you to forgive me because that’s yours to decide. But I need you to know that leaving was my failure, not yours. There was never a single second when I didn’t want to be your dad.
A long pause. Two minutes. Three. The longest three minutes of my life, sitting in a therapist’s waiting room with my phone pressed to my chest like a compress on a wound.
I know
I’m still really mad though
That’s okay. You get to be mad as long as you need to be.
Mom says you’re getting help now. Like therapy
I’m about to walk into my first appointment right now.
For real?
For real. First session. I’m in the waiting room.
Are you nervous
Yeah.
Good. You should be nervous. It means you care about getting better
I read that three times. Sixteen years old. Where did he get this? Not from me—I’d never been that wise at any age, let alone sixteen. From Fay then. From the life he’d built without me, the growing up he’d done in my absence, the kid becoming a person while I hid on a mountain.
When did you get so smart?
I’ve always been smart, Dad. You just weren’t around to see it
It was a jab and a truth and an invitation all at once, delivered with the precision of a kid who’d inherited his father’s directness and his mother’s emotional intelligence.
It cracked me open right there in the waiting room.
My eyes burned, and my jaw was so tight it hurt my teeth.
I pressed my thumb and forefinger against the bridge of my nose and breathed.
I’m seeing it now.
Yeah well, don’t stop
I won’t. That’s a promise I’m going to keep.
Ok. Go to your appointment. Text me after?
I will.
Ok. Bye dad. Good luck
Thanks, Boden.
I put the phone in my jacket pocket and pressed my palms flat on my thighs. Breathed in, out. In, out. The tightness in my chest had shifted from fear to grief and love and the raw, humbling experience of being seen clearly by your own child, flaws and failures and all.
“Mr. Heald?”
A woman stood in the doorway. Mid-fifties, dark hair cut short, strong jaw, no-nonsense posture that read military before she said a word.
She wore slacks and a button-down and no jewelry except a simple watch.
Her eyes were steady and assessing, like she’d seen enough damage to recognize it on sight but not so much that she’d stopped caring.
“I’m Sarah Delgado.” She extended her hand. Firm grip, brief. “Come on in.”
Her office was small, clean, and functional. Two chairs facing each other, a desk against the wall, a bookshelf, a window revealing firs. No couch. I’d expected a couch, the cliché of a therapist’s office, and its absence was a relief.
“Have a seat.”
I sat. The chair was more comfortable than the one in the waiting room. I cataloged the room—exits, sight lines, objects—but I caught myself doing it and stopped. Sarah watched me, and I knew she’d recognized it, but she didn’t comment on it.
“What would you like me to call you?” she asked. “Master Sergeant, Mr. Heald, Macallister, something else?”
“Mac. Mac is good.”
“Great. So, Mac, you’re former 82nd Airborne,” she said. “Three deployments, according to your intake form, two in active combat zones.”
“Yeah.”
“I was Air Force. Eleven years. Stationed at Bagram for two tours.” A beat. “I’m telling you that so you know I’m not working from a textbook.”
I nodded. The knot in my shoulders loosened a fraction.
“Tell me why you’re here, Mac. In your own words.”
In my own words. Not Dr. Everett’s medical summary, or the VA’s diagnostic codes, or the language of forms and intake questionnaires.
My words. I breathed in. Out. “I have PTSD. I was diagnosed twelve years ago, but it may have been happening before that. Flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance, the full list. I tried group therapy through the VA six years ago, and it made things worse. I tried medication, and it flattened me out to the point that I couldn’t function.
I stopped everything, moved to an isolated place and then another and another, and spent almost six years alone.
” I paused. “I’m here because I’m done being alone.
I have a son who needs his father to be functional.
And I have…” The word caught. Not because I didn’t know it, but because saying it in a therapist’s office made it real in a new way.
“I have someone. Someone I want to be whole for.”
Sarah didn’t write anything down. She just listened, the way Dr. Everett listened, the way Arek listened—with her full attention, her body still, her eyes on mine.
“Whole is a big word. I want to be honest with you about what EMDR can and can’t do.
It can’t erase what happened to you. It can’t undo years of neural pathways.
What it can do is change the way your brain stores and responds to traumatic memories.
Right now, your nervous system treats those memories as current threats.
EMDR helps your brain reclassify them as past events.
They still happened. They still matter. But they stop running the show. ”
“How?”
“It’s called bilateral stimulation. While you focus on a traumatic memory, I guide you through a series of lateral eye movements or tapping that engage both hemispheres of the brain.
It sounds simple, but it’s not. The process can be intense, and it requires you to access memories you’ve spent years avoiding.
But the research is strong, particularly for combat veterans. ”
“Dr. Everett mentioned eight to twelve sessions.”
“For some people. Others need more. We’ll know more after today.
” She paused. “I have one rule, Mac. Honesty. You don’t have to tell me everything in the first session or the fifth or the tenth.
But what you tell me has to be true. If something’s too hard, say so.
If you need to stop, say so. Don’t perform. ”
The word landed. Perform. Arek’s word. Arek’s affliction. And maybe, I realized, mine too. Different costumes—his warmth, my granite—but the same show. Presenting a version of yourself that could withstand inspection while the real thing hid behind the scenery. “I can do that.”
“Good. Then let’s start.”
She didn’t make me relive Kandahar in the first session.
I’d braced for it—the full excavation, the IED, the bodies, the sound of the blast that lived in my inner ear like tinnitus.
But Sarah started with an assessment. History, symptoms, triggers, and coping mechanisms. She asked questions with the efficiency of someone who’d conducted a thousand of these conversations and the care of someone who understood that each one was unique.
When she asked about the flashback with Fay, I told her.
Flat, factual. Sarah listened without flinching, without the carefully composed sympathy I’d gotten from the VA therapist, without the horror I’d dreaded.
She nodded once when I finished. “That’s a common presentation.
The nocturnal flashback, the physical response.
It’s not a character failure, Mac. It’s a neurological event.
Your amygdala fires, your body responds as if the threat is current, and the prefrontal cortex—the part that knows you’re safe—gets overridden. We can work with that.”
We can work with that. Five words that opened something in my chest that had been sealed since the night I’d woken up with my hands around Fay’s arms and her scream in my ears.
“I want to try a brief bilateral exercise today,” Sarah said. “Not targeting a specific memory. Just letting you experience the process so you know what to expect. Is that okay?”
“Yeah.”
She pulled her chair closer. Held up two fingers. “Follow my fingers with your eyes. Don’t move your head.”
Her fingers moved—left, right, left, right—and I tracked them. The motion was simple and strange, and after thirty seconds, something shifted in my chest. Not dramatic. Not a breakthrough. A softening, like a muscle releasing tension that it had held so long it had forgotten it was clenched.
“What are you noticing?” Sarah asked.
“My chest feels different. Looser.”
“Good. That’s the bilateral stimulation engaging the parasympathetic nervous system. We’re not doing deep work today, just letting your brain get used to the process. Think of it as calibration.”
We did three more sets. By the end, I was wrung out in a way that was different from exhaustion. I felt emptied rather than depleted, like a room cleared of clutter. Not clean yet. But cleared enough to see the floor.
“That’s enough for today,” Sarah said. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired. But not bad tired.”
“That’s normal. You might feel emotionally raw for the next day or two. Drink water, rest, don’t make any major decisions. And, Mac…” She met my eyes. “You did well. Walking in here was the hardest part, and you did it.”
I shook her hand at the door. Firm grip, brief. Same as the beginning.
“See you on Friday?” she asked.
Somehow, I’d agreed to two sessions a week. If I was doing this, I was doing it right. “Yeah. I’ll be here.”
“I know you will.”
In the truck, I sat with my hands on the wheel and the engine off. My chest was open in a way that felt unfamiliar and fragile, like new skin over a burn.
I pulled out my phone.
Survived the first session.
Boden responded in under a minute.
How was it
Hard. But good. She’s former Air Force. Doesn’t take any bullshit.
Lol sounds like mom
A laugh escaped me. Short, rough, startled. He wasn’t wrong.
Yeah, actually. A little bit.
Dad
Yeah?
Thanks for going. Like actually going and not just saying you would
I told you. Promises I’m going to keep.
I know. I’m starting to believe that
I read that last text three times. Starting to believe. Not there yet. Not trusting fully. But starting. The door had opened another inch.
Thank you
I had started the truck and was about to drive off when another text came in.
Could I stay with you for a few weeks during summer break? Do you have room?
My heart performed a skip-hop that made me worry about a cardiac event for a second before it stabilized again. Boden wanted to come. Here. To my mountain. To my life.
I would love that. I will always have room for you.
Cool. I’ll talk to mom
I will call her and talk to her as well. She needs to be okay with it.
She will be.
K. Bye dad
My hands were shaking when I slowly put my phone away. Boden wanted to come during summer break. A few weeks, he’d said. Not a weekend. A few weeks. That meant…
I blew out a breath. No, I wouldn’t come to conclusions just yet. I had to talk to Fay first. Boden could say she’d be okay, but I wasn’t too sure she trusted me enough to hand over our boy yet. But the hope that took root in my heart was all but impossible to ignore as I started the drive back.
And when I reached Forestville, instead of turning left toward the mountain, toward the silence, I turned right. Toward Arek.
The mountain would still be there tomorrow.
Right now, I wanted a home-cooked meal and a man with the most amazing green eyes.
I wanted two boys, one loud and one quiet, balancing each other out perfectly.
I wanted the warm, chaotic, terrifying, wonderful noise of a new life I was building, one small step at a time.