10. Chapter 10
I flop onto the couch of Dr. Dormsworth’s office like I own the damn thing.
I don’t, obviously.
I’ve been coming here long enough now that the room doesn’t feel entirely like a trap. More like a place that I can breathe without immediately looking for exits.
It took six weeks to get to this point, but we’re here now.
Six weeks of showing up, sitting down, and answering the safer questions. Work. Sleep. Habits. Coping. The kind of stuff you can talk about without scraping open anything that bleeds.
That apparently ends today, because I can feel it in the air before Dr. Dormsworth even speaks.
He sits across from me in his chair, calm as always, posture loose like he’s got all the time in the world.
He doesn’t look like he’s bracing himself for a fight, which is exactly what irritates me.
He instead flips his notebook closed, just a quiet little shift that tells me he’s done collecting baseline data like I’m a lab rat.
His icy blue eyes finally lift to mine, steady and unblinking.
“Tell me about your mother.”
Ugh, there it is.
I stare back at him, waiting for my body to do what it usually does when someone goes near the subject. Tense and deflect. Maybe even joke and shut down. All the well-worn survival tricks, but I’m on this couch for a reason.
My fingers drift to the edge of my sleeve without thinking, brushing against the bracelet beneath it. I press my thumb into the charm until the metal bites painfully and pulls me into the present to keep me here.
“What about my mother?” I counter dryly.
“What she did and didn’t do.” His reply even.
I let out a short laugh. “That’s a big question.”
“It is,” he agrees. “Start small. Just one memory and we will go from there.”
My mouth opens and nothing comes out. Because if I start, I don’t get to choose where it goes. That’s memories. They aren’t polite nor do they arrive in order. And they certainly don’t stop when you ask them to. They’ll drown you in them until you suffocate and lose yourself beneath the surface.
“I don’t know. She was just… there. Sometimes.” I murmur finally, shifting on the couch. It squeaks beneath me and sounds a lot louder in this space than it normally does.
He doesn’t let those words skate past him. “Sometimes?”
“She worked when she felt like it. She got clean sometimes. She tried—”
“Sadie,” he interrupts gently, not harsh but not letting me hide in vague either. “You’re describing pattern. Not a relationship.”
My jaw clenches as I glare back at him, but he waits. He lets the silence stretch, and I realize he isn’t going to rescue me from it. He’s going to let it do its job.
“She wasn’t maternal,” I mutter and drop my hands into my lap. “Not in the ways people mean when they say that.”
“What ways?” He probes.
“The consistent ways. The normal ones. Packing lunches. Asking about school. Knowing what my favorite color was. Not leaving me alone for hours so she could disappear into a bedroom with some guy whose name I didn’t know.” I list plainly. Not sure how else to do it.
Dr. Dormsworth’s expression doesn’t change. There’s no shock or pity, just blatant attention.
“How old were you?” He asks.
“It didn’t matter,” I snap automatically. Not sure why I felt defensive of that.
His gaze remains on me, patient. “It clearly mattered to you.”
“I don’t know. Six? Seven? Eight? It was always happening. It didn’t just start, it just existed.” I mutter.
“Okay,” he murmurs, like he’s marking it down somewhere inside his head. “When you say she disappeared into the bedroom, what did you do?”
The question pries at something. Not the obvious horror, not the big trauma later, but the quiet rot of being a child and realizing you aren’t the priority.
“I stayed quiet,” I breathe, eyes fixed on a spot on the wall now. “I watched TV with the volume low and ate cereal for dinner. I learned how to make myself small.”
“Because?”
“Because when I wasn’t small, I was inconvenient. And inconveniences get punished.” The words come out sharper than I mean them to.
He doesn’t so much as flinch. “Punished how?”
I stiffen. The question inside of a door that I’m not wanting to open yet.
“Not like that. Not physical. Not—” I stop and force the truth. “Not by her, at least. She didn’t hit me.”
He nods slowly, accepting the boundary without trying to shove through it.
“Then what did she do when you were inconvenient?” He asks, coming at it from the same direction again. Unwilling to let me completely back down from facing it.
“She ignored me or she’d snap. Yell, kind of. Tell me to stop being dramatic and that I was too sensitive. Or that I was ruining her night.” I fidget, knee bouncing again.
He doesn’t say anything and I glance to him, anger stirring in my chest like a flame trying to catch oxygen. I hate that we’re dredging all this shit up. Especially when I had pushed it down so long ago. “She’d act like I was selfish for needing her. Like I was demanding something unreasonable.”
“What were you demanding?” He counters gently.
I laugh, and it’s ugly. “A mother.”
The word hangs in the room, heavy and unavoidably true.
Dr. Dormsworth gaze doesn’t move. “Say more.”
I stare at him like he’s insane. How is that not sufficient? How has what I said not done its job and filled in the gaps he clearly wants to pry open with his fingers.
“What do you want me to say?” I grind out past my clenched jaw.
“I want you to say what follows up what you already have. Finish the thought, Sadie.” He demands smoothly.
“Fine? You want to hear that she chose everything else? She did. Drugs. Men. Parties. Whatever came next. I was just there, a piece of furniture and a responsibility she didn’t ask for.” I snap in frustration.
“And how did that make you feel?”
I could scream.
I push up off my feet and decide that pacing is better than sitting. My eyes looking for any point in the room that doesn’t make me want to hurl something at his stubbornly calm head.
I want to tell him that I don’t know and that it doesn’t matter.
I want to make a joke and pivot and talk about bartending again like my life is just late nights and tips.
But fuck—I’m here. I’ve kept showing up knowing we would get to this point, and I knew I would have to face it. That I couldn’t cower or get angry.
I stop a few feet away from him, arms wrapped to my shoulder as my foot taps and my eyes bore into his own.
His dark hair styled nicely atop his head as he peers up at me through his glasses.
For the barest of moments I wonder what he would look like messy.
He was a handsome man, well—gorgeous if we’re being down right honest. But there’s a lack of light in those blue eyes that gives warning to the man he really is.
My temple jumps and I force my next words out.
“I felt abandoned.”
He nods once, almost imperceptibly, like he’s been waiting for that surface. “By what?”
I scoff, “by her.”
Obviously.
“By the person she was supposed to be and who she never could be.”
My fingers curl into my arms where I shift to fold them over my chest, nails pressing into the leather of my jacket as I study Dr. Dormsworth for a reaction to my answer. I breathe through it like I’m riding out a wave.
His tone is ever-calm. “When you were abandoned, what did you learn about yourself?”
I blink. And if I didn’t think I was pissed off before, I am now.
“What did I learn?” I repeat, incredulous.
“Yes. Not what you learned about her, but yourself.”
I glare at him but force the answer forward, even if it feels like dragging hooks through my skin to do it. “That I wasn’t worth staying for, or enough.”
He doesn’t validate it or reassure me, and he sure as fuck doesn’t say that it’s not true like people do when they want to fix a feeling instead of understand it. Though, a part of me wishes he would.
He just asks, “And how does that belief show up now?”
Heat creeps up my neck.
“It doesn’t,” I lie automatically.
He of course can spy my reaction and no doubt sees right through my bullshit.
I exhale hard, frustrated. “Fine. It shows up in everything.”
“In what ways?”
“I don’t let people get close. Not really. I keep things shallow, and if someone wants more than I can give, I leave first. I stop it before they can.”
“So you abandon them,” he says gently.
The words make something in my chest jerk, defensive. “I don’t—”
“You do,” he chops, still calm. “Not because you’re cruel. Because it gives you control and lets you choose the ending before they do.”
I hate how accurate that is. I fidget and shift my weight on my feet before deciding to sit back down across from him again, his eyes tracking each movement.
“You said you want to feel,” he says, and the phrasing is so close to something else in my memory that my spine tightens. His tone doesn’t change, but my brain snags on it anyway. “You said you didn’t want to rot. Talk to me about what ‘feeling’ means for you?”
I blink, caught off guard. Had I said that? Shit, I can’t remember.
“Is this about my mom?”
“It’s connected. As most things are,” He retorts smoothly.
I study him, and for a moment I can’t shake the sense that he’s already mapped this path of the conversation. That he knows exactly what he’s pulling toward the surface. I’m just unsure what he wants to do with it.
“Dangerous,” I finally answer.
He waits.
“Because if I feel too much, then I want things. I want people and… connection.” I twitch when I add that on the end truthfully.
“And wanting a connection is dangerous because?”
“Because you can’t control it. You can’t guarantee they’ll stay. Because you can’t—” I stop my snipe, swallowing around the ache. “Because you can’t make someone choose you.”
He studies me. “So you don’t give them a chance.”
I don’t answer, but I don’t have to. He knows the answer, he’s said it himself. These circles he’s dragging me in feel more like a spiral that digs deeper with each go around. The same question, just rephrased and meant to chip more away with each hard swirl.
“Good,” he finally states.
The word makes my head rear back a bit. “Good?”
“Yes,” he murmurs. “Not because it feels good, but because it’s clear. We have something concrete to work with.”
We do?
Part of me wants to argue that none of this is new, that I already know all of this, that talking about it won’t change what has happened.
“Here’s what I’m hearing: your relationship with your mother taught you that you are not chosen, and that needing is dangerous. You adapted by becoming self-sufficient and by leaving first. That kept you safe, but it also kept you alone."
“I’m not alone,” I argue.
“You have people,” he agrees. “Imogen and community. A routine even, but emotional closeness is different.”
I look away, deciding that the muted rug is exactly the right place to glare for now on.
He doesn’t push harder though. He doesn’t pry into the boyfriends. He stays where we are, right on the edge of the wound that shaped everything without ripping deeper than I can handle today.
“I want to give you homework.”
I grimace. “Of course you do.”
A faint shift crosses his expression—not a smile exactly, but something amused. “It’s not punishment, Sadie.”
“Feels like it.”
“It’s work and it’s meant to be difficult.” He snorts.
I sigh, already bracing for whatever bullshit he’s bound to spew.
He starts, “This week, I want you to write two letters. You won’t send either of them.”
“Okay?”
“One letter is to your mother and you will write it as if she will read it. Tell her what she did and didn’t do. Tell her what it cost you.”
That sounds like buckets of fun, said no one ever.
“The second letter,” he adds, “is to the version of you that was left behind. Seventeen or younger, if that’s what comes up. You will write to her as if you are the person she needed.”
That’s cruel, in a precise way.
“That’s a lot,” I manage.
“Yes, and you will bring them next week. You can read them aloud, or you can hand them to me. You decide.”
My fingers tap where they now rest against my thigh, my thoughts all over the place. What could I possibly say that would fit onto paper. How could I possibly say it? How does this help outside of dragging up old memories and feelings?
“Why?” I decide to challenge.
“Because you can’t heal a wound you refuse to look at and because the belief that you weren’t worth choosing needs to be challenged—not with reassurance, but with evidence. Your words will be that evidence.”
I sink back into the couch, suddenly exhausted. A part of me wants to laugh and a whole other part wants to cry. Although, a very large part wants to bite at him for even suggesting it.
And then a small—stubborn and buried—part wants to do the homework.
“Fine,” I mutter.
He nods once, satisfied without making a show of it. “Good. Now we know what we’re working with.”
I stand on unsteady legs and tug my jacket into place, sensing this session is over and I can scuttle back to the bar and my bus. As I reach for the door, his voice follows me, calm and clinical.
“Same time next week.”
Right, of course.
I leave, and the whole way home I can’t stop thinking about the letters I never plan to send and the ugly truths I’m going to have to write anyway.