12. Chapter 12
Caroline
Colt showed up to his second session with Dr. Williamson with less anger and more openness than I'd anticipated.
I wasn't supposed to be seeing him. Our therapeutic relationship had ended. But Dr. Williamson had requested a brief consultation—a handoff conversation about treatment strategy and the work I'd already done.
It was professional. Appropriate. The kind of thing therapists did when transitioning patients.
It was also an excuse to see him again, and I knew it.
He looked healthier. The three weeks of inpatient care had given his face back some of its color. The dark circles under his eyes were less pronounced. But there was something else too—a lightness in his expression that suggested he'd finally stopped carrying the weight of everything alone.
"How's the transition going?" I asked, keeping my voice professional.
"Better than I expected," he said. "Dr. Williamson is good. Different from you, but good. She's helping me understand that my trauma isn't something I need to fix. It's something I need to integrate."
"That's accurate."
"She's also not as easy to intimidate," he said, and there was the ghost of a smile at the edge of his mouth.
I wanted to tell him that I was intimidated by him because he'd mattered to me. That professional distance had been harder than anything I'd done in years precisely because he kept proving that he was worth breaking the rules for.
Instead, I said: "That's important. You need a therapist you can't manipulate."
After the official consultation ended, I should have closed the file and moved on. Should have maintained professional distance. Should have remembered that six months of separation was supposed to clarify whether my feelings were real or transference.
But Colt lingered in the doorway.
"Thank you," he said quietly. "For what you did. For caring enough to confront me. For referring me out when you knew it was necessary. For making me believe that recovery was possible."
"That's what therapists do," I said, and the words felt inadequate.
"No. That's what people do when they care about someone. There's a difference."
He left before I could respond.
***
Over the next several weeks, I didn't see Colt. But I continued investigating the inconsistencies in his case file. The dead detective. The shift log contradictions. The interrogators who didn't match official records.
And I waited for him to finish his inpatient stay and return to weekly sessions with Dr. Williamson.
When I caught sight of him at Lena's fundraiser, it took all my professional composure not to react.
He was wearing a dark button-up shirt, his hair cut shorter than I remembered, his posture carrying the confidence of someone who'd started to rebuild themselves. He was talking with Ditch when he saw me, and I watched as the conversation stopped mid-sentence.
His eyes found mine across the ballroom, and suddenly the crowd full of people felt completely irrelevant.
I had noticed a change in our interactions. During the handoff conversation, Colt had been guarded but open. Now, each time I saw him at club events or heard about him through Lena, he seemed to be genuinely healing.
Dr. Williamson mentioned in our consultation that he was processing his trauma in increasingly healthy ways. That he was opening up in sessions instead of resisting. That he was beginning to imagine a future instead of just surviving another day.
I was genuinely proud of him. And I was genuinely struggling with the fact that I missed him in ways that went far beyond professional concern.
Six months felt like a long time.