11. Chapter 11
I tell myself that what I’m doing tonight is clinical.
That the desire to observe her outside of my office is strictly professional curiosity, nothing more. An extension of assessment, per se. A way to confirm whether the patterns she speaks about in session manifest the way I suspect they do in her natural environment.
It’s an altogether reasonable rationale.
Anyone would agree.
It is also, if I am honest, a convenient one.
Two nights have passed since our last session and since she sat on my couch and said the word abandoned.
Does my little fox know that she’ll never have to worry about such a thing again?
Probably not. It will take time for her to understand, and it’s a damn good thing she has a decent therapist to help her realize it is true.
Valentine’s Day is the easiest cover too.
Not because I need one—no one in a crowded bar is looking for a man like me—but because the density of bodies provides anonymity. Noise becomes camouflage and movement becomes concealment. A busy night is a blind night, and I am all for it.
If she sees me, if she registers my face in the sea of them as familiar, it will complicate things too early and I have no intention of making them yet. Not when I’m still compiling her life into my boxes and figuring out how to dismantle each one of them in due time.
Is it fair to build her up to tear her down? To make her eventually dependent on my presence? No, but I’ve never really cared before when wrecking someone’s life, and I don’t see why I should start now.
The bar is exactly as she described it. A dive in the truest sense, and not the stylized kind with curated grit and ironic neon.
This place wears its history right at the surface.
The parking lot is uneven. The exterior signage buzzes as if it’s dying.
The door sticks when I pull it open, and I’m met immediately by heat, sound, and the thick smell of alcohol soaked into old wood.
It’s the noise that hits me first though.
Laughter. Shouting. A base line thumping through cheap speakers.
Glass clinking. The sharp crack of a pool break somewhere deeper inside.
Every table is full and bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder.
Someone brushes past me carrying a tray of drinks and doesn't bother to apologize when some of it sloshes over the sleeve of my jacket.
Sighing, I wipe my finger to the beer and flick it to the floor where the rest of it has gone to call home.
I move instinctively to the darker corner near the back wall where the lighting is weaker and the sightlines are broken by people standing, leaning, and swaying drunkenly. Somewhere I can disappear and watch without being actively watched in return.
I’m carving a path to the spot I’ve set my eyes on when I nearly walk into a damn wall. Not a literal one, but her.
Sadie is on a small stage near the center of the room and the sight stops me more effectively than any physical barrier.
She stands beneath a single warm spotlight that turns her pale skin into something almost luminous against the dark.
The bar is packed so tightly that people spill into aisles and cluster in front of the stage, drinks raised, and faces turned toward her like they’re waiting for a miracle or a joke.
I shift on my feet to get a better look at her as she holds her microphone in one hand, elbow bent loosely as if she belongs there. What is she doing up there? She had never mentioned in our sessions that she might have some act that would draw a crowd like this.
I don’t know why the thought jars me.
In my office she is restrained, compact even.
A woman who sits on the edge of the couch as if comfort is something she hasn’t earned.
Here, on a stage in front of a crowd that could swallow her, she looks…
steady. Not fearless from the slight gleam in her eyes, but certainly awake in ways I had only seen in that mirrored room.
Her hair tonight is messy; the kind that says she either just rolled out of bed or has thoroughly been fucked.
The wild golden strands shoved back over one shoulder and highlighting the dark clothes she always wears.
Her practical lines softened by something that reads as choice rather than necessity.
She scans the room once with those expressive green eyes and smiles.
Fuck me.
Maybe coming wasn’t the best idea.
Because her smile isn’t sharp or defensive, but real.
The kind that knocks the wind from my lungs and yanks on something inside of my head that I’ve never given credit to.
From the immediate reaction of the crowd, I’m not the only one feeling a certain kind of way.
Men whistle and women cheer, someone shouts her name like it’s an honor to know it.
She laughs, tipping her chin down briefly, almost shy, then speaks into the mic.
“I take song requests,” she drawls in that smoky, sinful voice. “Within reason.”
The room erupts with noise and I stand very still, half-hidden at the edge of the crowd, as something else not to be named takes hold of my chest.
I did not know she could sing.
I did not know she did any of this, and the immediate thought that follows is worse: What else don’t I know?
A man near the stage yells something and she points at him with the mic, amused.
“No, not that one.” She laughs.
More laughter follows chorused by cheers.
The energy is wild, bright and chaotic in the way crowds become when they’re given permission.
It’s Valentine’s Day, and this bar is full of people trying to feel something loud enough to drown out whatever they go home to, and Sadie acts as if she is all too willing to serve it up to them.
She watches them with the kind of ease that suggests she’s been doing this for a long time, and she’s not trapped by it. How had I not seen this version of her in her sessions or asked to see it?
She shifts her weight, glancing down at someone close to the stage who holds up a phone. The bright screen lights up her face and I can only assume it’s a song title by the way she nods once.
“Alright,” she starts into the mic, gesturing for people to settle. “This one’s not exactly… happy. But it’s beautiful so don’t ruin it by being a bunch of ungrateful assholes.”
Laughter ripples out and she turns to the man who is standing beside a computer, saying something past her mic that I can’t catch through the noise around me.
He nods and the lights over the stage dim slightly.
The bar quiets—not completely, but enough.
The sound system crackles once, then steadies.
Sadie lifts the microphone closer to her mouth and she begins.
The first notes are familiar, but not in the way most people would expect. It isn’t the bright, fast pop version that plays in grocery stores and nostalgic playlists.
It’s slower, lower, and haunting.
It takes me a second to recognize it as “Take on Me”, but by the time I do, my attention is already caught and held.
Her voice isn’t thin or shaky, it isn’t something she does casually.
It’s controlled with smoke and texture, like she’s singing through something lived-in.
The melody drags like silk over broken glass; soft, but sharp at the edges.
She doesn’t oversell it nor does she perform something emotionally theatrical.
She just sings.
And the bar—this loud, messy place full of people spilling beer and shouting over pool games—goes still in a way I wouldn’t have believed if I wasn’t watching it happen.
Heads turn to her and conversations taper off mid-sentence.
A man near me stops laughing and stares at the stage like he’s trying to remember what it feels like to be sober.
Sadie’s eyes close on the chorus, lashes shadowing her cheekbones and the spotlight catches the curve of her mouth as she shapes the words.
She’s devastating in this element. Not in the way she had cried out in the mirrored room, but in a way that burrows so deep inside of you there is no hope of clawing it out.
She’s hooked inside each and every person in the room, captured in the same awe that has me drowning.
She on the other hand does not look like a woman drowning, she’s one that looks as if she’s learned how to float. Her voice rises flawlessly on the higher line and the room doesn’t interrupt it. No one shouts or whistles. No one tries to turn it into something dirty.
We all just exist in this strange place that is captured in this moment. Completely taken.
My eyes turn down to her hands as she sings; one steady on the mic, the other relaxed at her side until the chorus, when her fingers curl and flex like she’s holding something invisible. And I don’t think it’s nerves with that expression, but maybe ownership.
My mind tries to label it to understand what I’m looking at through the lens I’m accustomed to using. Performance as regulation. Music as coping strategy. Controlled exposure. Connection without vulnerability.
But the analysis feels too small for what this is.
She’s simply alive.
The song ends with a drowned-out note that fades into silence, and for a heartbeat the bar holds its breath.
Then it breaks.
Applause erupts like a wave crashing against the stage as people cheer and shout and whistle.
Someone pounds a fist on a table hard enough to rattle glasses and another near the front throws his hands up like she’s won something.
Sadie laughs, bowing in a playful gesture.
When she straightens again, she’s still smiling.
Bright enough to soften the hard lines I’ve been mapping in my head. Bright enough to make her look younger than twenty-three. Bright enough to reveal something that doesn’t fit neatly into any of the trauma outlines in my notebook.
It’s joy.
Not constant or na?ve joy, but present.
I mark it instinctively, the way a hunter marks fresh tracks. If she can feel joy here, in this place, in the midst of chaos, then she is not as closed off as she thinks she is. She’s not depressed, but repressed. And there is a difference.
Sadie lifts the mic again, laughing as the crowd continues to roar.
“Alright, alright,” She calls. “You’re going to make me blush, and then I’ll mess up on the next one.”
Not that they give a shit, they’re going bonkers at the prospect of another.
“Drink break first! Then I’ll do another.
” She promises as she steps down from the stage and disappears into the crowd with practiced ease.
Sliding through bodies like she’s among them.
People reach out to lightly touch her arm or shoulder, all of it friendly and familiar.
She doesn’t once flinch or recoil, but beams back and offers words I can’t make out.
I watch her as she pushes to the bar, slipping behind it with the smooth confidence of someone who knows every inch of that space. Within seconds she’s back to work; hands moving fast, smile flashing as she takes orders, laughing at something someone says.
She’s good at this.
Not just the bartending, but the social dance.
I adjust my position to get a better view as she leans in to hear a customer over the chaos, then straightens and slides a drink across the counter with a grin that feels genuine.
It bothers me.
Not because its happy, but because she has this version of herself that exists entirely outside of what she gives me in my office.
I see now that I’ve been working with an incomplete picture and I do not like that. That would need to change, and I would have to figure out a way to make it so.
My jaw tightens as I fight the urge to move closer. It would only be a step, just enough to hear her voice without the microphones filter, but I don’t move.
I remind myself that I am not here to be seen, but to observe. So I stay where I am, drinkless, untouched by the bar’s chaos, and let the questions build.
What makes her tick outside of her trauma?
What does she want when she isn’t afraid?
Who is she when she isn’t trying to survive?
I realize, with a slow, sharp interest, that the answers to those questions might matter more than anything she’s said on my couch. Because trauma explains why someone breaks, but it doesn’t explain why they keep going.
And Sadie keeps going.
I want to know how.
I will know how.
Exhaling, I leave before she sings again.
Not because I’ve had enough, but because I don’t trust myself to stay without shifting from observation into something else. Because the longer I watch her move through that room like she belongs to it, the more something in me wants to step into her line of sight and see what happens.
I can’t do that.
Yet.
I slip out into the cold night air and let the door shut behind me. The sound of the bar muffles instantly, leaving only faint bass leaking through the walls like a distant heartbeat.
As I walk back to my car, the image of her on that stage follows me. Hell, her voice follows me. And beneath it all, a quiet certainty settles, unpleasant and satisfying in equal measure.
I have more questions now than I did when I walked in.
And I will get the answers.