Chapter Twenty-Two
Mia
“Let me explain.”
“Please do,” I reply curtly. I always want to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I won’t deny that this feels like an invasion of privacy. Memories I’d buried deep begin to resurface.
Why would you want to hide anything from me?
Don’t you want to know everything about each other?
Let me see your phone. I need to make sure no one is taking advantage of you.
I swallow thickly, pushing the memories back down. Alfie isn’t like him.
“What are you looking for?” I ask when he doesn’t reply.
He rubs his hands down his face, glancing at the clock. I came straight from the Elwood campus, and he’s probably wondering what I’m doing here.
“Austin told me he overheard you and Olivia talking about some notes you’d received from me.”
“Oh…yes, I told Olivia about them.” My face starts to flood with heat.
If Austin heard the details of that conversation, he’ll know damn well that I said I was starting to feel uncomfortable about the notes.
Alfie’s pained expression has him running a hand over his face.
The scrape of his beard scratching against his palm.
“Mia, I don’t want to frighten you—"
“You haven’t,” I interrupt, desperate to mitigate a reaction.
“I just thought they were getting a bit…possessive, and they sounded so unlike you. I thought maybe you were trying to be sexy, but it’s not really the dynamic we have, and I just wanted to ask Olivia her thoughts.
You know, given that Austin can be quite intense and—"
“Mia, I didn’t write the notes,” he interrupts, his eyes locked on mine, his mouth downturned. He’s running his hand over his mouth again.
I pause my rambling and stare. This is a joke. It has to be. Of course he wrote them. Who else would be writing me notes and leaving them in my drawer to find along with a flower?
“You’re joking.” I scoff, my pulse hammering in my ears.
“Mia…I’m sorry, but I’m not. I wanted to find the notes to see if I could work out who has been sending them.”
“They weren’t sent. They were left in my bottom drawer.”
“They’re not there now. I checked. Where are they, love?”
“I- I leave them under my keyboard. The flowers I would just take home with me. I thought…I thought they were from you.”
My God. I’d been keeping them like little mementos.
Smelling them until they wilted too much.
I’d pressed them in a book, for God's sake. What is wrong with me? Of course, Alfie isn’t leaving me love notes and flowers.
Have I learned anything in the last ten years?
Real men aren’t leaving their office managers flowers and love notes.
He lifts up my keyboard, taking the notes and flipping through them.
He pauses for a moment.
“You kept this?” His face looks concerned, almost guilty, when he shows me the print out of the address he gave me for the house-sitting.
It didn’t say anything romantic, but he’d put a little smiley face at the end of it, and I don’t know why, but I wanted to keep it.
He helped me out when I needed it, and I wanted to keep the token as a memory that sometimes people are good.
My cheeks flush. Is it weird to keep it?
It was from around four weeks ago, maybe five now.
It just made me feel wanted, and I wanted to hold on to the feeling.
A sinking feeling hits my stomach, and I feel like I’m seventeen all over again, putting too much meaning into a relationship with a man that could ruin me.
I don’t respond. I just wring my fingers together. He doesn’t press, simply holding out the piece of paper to me, and I slip it into my purse.
The silence grows between as he flicks through the notes again, his frown marring his features.
“You’ve never seen anyone around your desk or dropping them off?”
“No.
“And when would you receive them?”
“Always on a Thursday. I was—" I stop myself.
“You were what?”
“I was excited to see what I would have tomorrow.” I turn toward the waiting room couch, suddenly feeling light-headed and shaky.
Alfie moves toward me immediately.
“Hey, it’s okay. I’m going to take care of this. I’ll find out who it is, and I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
I nod in response, and he pulls me against his chest. I can't help but let out a small whimper.
“I want you to go home. Pack whatever you need for tonight and come straight back to my house, okay? Anything you need to study, anything you want. But you’re staying with me.”
I nod again.
“Please say something, love. I need to hear your voice right now.”
“Yes,” I croak, swiping away my tears. “I’ll pack a bag and head straight to yours. I do really need to study tonight though.”
“I know. Scout's honor, I’ll cook you dinner and help you practice questions that will come up in your defense.”
I grab my purse and Alfie’s keys, slipping out without telling him why I came.
◆◆◆
I jolt awake and I feel Alfie’s soothing hand on my head, stroking my hair. I inhale deeply through my nose, desperately trying to calm my racing heart.
“You’re safe, sweet girl.”
Sweet girl?
I turn to face Alfie, but it’s not him. The face of Carter looms over me, his wide smile I used to find so sincere twisting into something sinister. His thumb reaches out to graze my lip, but I jolt again, for real this time.
I sit up panting. The room is dark, and I check my phone, it’s gone seven. I must have needed that sleep for a few hours.
I can hear Alfie in the kitchen, pots and pans tinkering against each other as he cooks.
I rub my eyes. I haven’t dreamed about Carter in so long.
I think the stress of moving toward a new chapter in my life has my memories surfacing.
I wish I could cut him out completely, but I know he’ll always be a part of me.
It’s like a warning; my brain is trying to tell me something I’m not quite understanding yet.
I pad down the stairs, my bare feet scrunching at the cold tiles of the kitchen. Alfie is wearing an apron, his head bent low into a pan, muttering something about oregano. He spins around when he hears me and I let out a loud laugh. His glasses have fogged up from the steam.
“Are you laughing at me, Miss Sinclair?” He pulls them off, rubbing them with the bottom of his T-shirt. He must have changed since he got home, because he’s wearing the sweat pants again. My body hums. Even in my heightened state of concern and stress, my body still reaches for him.
“Only because you look so adorable in this apron.”
“Hmm, I should wear it more often then.” He leans down to kiss my forehead and cup my cheek before I take a look in the pan.
“Spaghetti bolognese?”
“Yep, I thought some comfort food would be good.” His eyes dart between mine before he lets out a deep, weighted sigh.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” I say as I watch his face grimace.
“I feel like I’ve failed you.”
I shake my head. This man puts so much pressure on himself to be perfect.
“You haven’t. Where is this coming from? We know the risks of working with patients. There’s always a risk that they'll grow an attachment. At least it’s me that’s receiving notes and not someone else.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I just mean, at least we’ve got ahead of it. We can work out who’s been leaving them and fix the situation.”
He nods. “I need to tell you something about me. I don’t want to have secrets between us. I…I want you to know this part of me is something I’m trying to work on. I’m trying to be better and move past the things that have happened to me.”
“Okay,” I say nervously.
He sighs, placing the wooden spoon on a dish by the stove and taking my hand in his.
“When I was a postdoc and newly qualified, I had a girlfriend. We’d dated on and off, but in hindsight it was a pretty volatile relationship.
She wanted to be loved in a way that I just couldn’t give her at the time.
Her friends were getting engaged, getting married and having babies, even buying houses.
I was…snowed under with work, working to build a career.
The pay was okay, but I was new, and I was working every hour under the sun.
It was grueling, but it’s not just that I had to do it; I wanted to.
We had been fighting pretty badly one week, and I had a session with a patient.
I could feel my phone buzzing in my pocket, and all I could think about was responding quickly enough that it didn’t escalate into a full-blown shitstorm by the time I got home.
My patient was quiet that day, but I didn't think too much of it.”
He swallows hard, turning away to put away some spices in the cupboard above the stove. I put one hand on his arm, with the other, I rub smooth circles on his back. I can sense where this admission is going, and it’s every psychologist's worst nightmare.
“She tried to kill herself a few days after our session. She ended up going to a mental health facility, but due to the damage she’d done to her brain from the lack of oxygen, she’ll never quite be the same again.
Her family has told me she’s happier now, but it doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t catch it.
I was too ashamed to continue treating her and asked my boss to take over the sessions. ”
“Alfie, we work with very sick people, and we can only do what we can do during our one hour a week with them. You’re not responsible for every single person that walks through those doors. They have to be the ones to enact change. You can only guide them.”
Now him stalking patients makes so much more sense. This man—I want to scream at him sometimes—he’s the most caring man I’ve ever met. And even after experiencing that so early in his career, he still wanted to try to have a relationship with me, and I shot him down.