4. Kai #2
She thinks about the question rather than answering immediately. Her eyes drift toward the windows behind me, where a low gray sky hangs over Minneapolis and turns the neighboring buildings into muted sheets of steel.
“Not at first,” she says. “At first, I was in his car.”
“How old were you?”
“I’m not sure. Seven, maybe eight.”
“What do you remember?”
“The drums.” Her mouth softens with the beginning of a smile before she catches it. “He used to wait for that part and then start hitting the steering wheel like he was performing at Wembley instead of driving through traffic. He was terrible at it.”
“You smiled when you said that.”
The softness vanishes from her expression. “No, I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“You seem very sure of yourself for someone who met me just five minutes ago.”
“I’m sure about what I saw. I’m not pretending I know what it means yet.”
“That’s a very convenient distinction.”
“It helps prevent reckless conclusions.”
She studies me, perhaps deciding whether I’m teasing her or quietly correcting her. The slight narrowing of her eyes suggests she hasn’t decided.
“You looked guilty afterward,” I add.
Her fingers stop moving over the bottle cap. “I’m not.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You implied it.”
“I said you looked guilty. That doesn’t automatically mean the guilt belongs there.”
Her gaze drops. For a few seconds, she says nothing, and I let the silence remain. She notices quickly.
“You do that on purpose.”
“Do what?”
“Wait until people get uncomfortable enough to keep talking.”
“I’m listening.” I explain, keeping my tone plain but at the same time inviting enough for her to continue.
“That sounds suspiciously strategic.”
“It can be both.”
A breath leaves her that could almost be a laugh.
“I know I’m allowed to remember good things,” she says eventually. “It just feels strange when the ending was so…”
She trails off.
“Violent?” I offer.
Her eyes return to mine.
“Yes.” The word is barely louder than the heating system moving air through the vents.
“The way someone dies can become so dominant that it starts rewriting everything that came before it,” I say. “Remembering him before the suicide doesn’t erase what happened, and what happened doesn’t invalidate every good memory.”
“I’m aware of that… logically.” The pause in which she said that tells me otherwise so I offer another explanation.
“Logic and grief rarely cooperate.”
“I thought psychiatrists preferred logic.”
“We prefer honesty. Logic is useful when it isn’t being used to hide behind.”
Her mouth tightens. “That sounded targeted.”
“It was an observation.”
“You’ve been making a lot of those.”
“It’s part of the service.”
“Should I have chosen a cheaper package?”
It takes all I have to stifle a laugh, but I do take on the challenge of the back and forth. “That depends on how attached you are to the chair.”
The laugh that slips out of her is quiet but unguarded enough that it deepens the dimple beside her mouth. Something warm shifts low in my chest.
Fuck.
I’ve been attracted to patients before. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest and professionally naive. Attraction is a physiological response, not an ethical violation. It becomes dangerous when it affects treatment or behavior, and I’ve never had difficulty recognizing the boundary.
But Julia has been in my office for little over ten minutes, and I already resent the idea of those minutes ending. That isn’t normal, and it sure as hell isn’t something I intend to indulge.
“What came after the memory of being in the car?” I go back to the conversation at hand thinking it might just bring back my focus to where it should be.
Her smile fades again. “Everything else.”
“Tell me what that includes.”
She takes a slow breath, the kind people use when they’re preparing to recite a story they’ve repeated enough times to remove themselves from it.
“He’d been missing for fifteen days before they found him.”
“And you were listed as the primary family contact.”
Her gaze sharpens slightly, again surprised that I know something she has already provided in writing.
“Eventually, yes.”
“You wrote that you continued working during the search because staying home made the waiting worse.”
“It did.”
“Did work make it better?”
“No, but it gave me something else to think about.”
“Did it?”
Her gaze narrows. “Occasionally.”
“What happened every time the phone rang?”
“I assumed someone had found him.”
The composure in her voice begins to thin as she rolls the bottle between her palms, staring at the label as if it deserves more attention than the memory she’s describing.
“Then, when it wasn’t the police, I’d get angry at whoever called, even though they didn’t know what was happening.
I was awful to a telemarketer who asked whether I had considered changing my internet provider. ”
“I’m sure they recovered.”
“I hope not. He was very persistent.”
Her attempt at humor doesn’t reach her eyes this time, and I don’t allow it to carry us away from the question. “Were you sleeping?”
“Not much.”
“Eating?”
“Tessa brought food.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.” That came out harsher than I intended for it to be.
She exhales slowly. “Sometimes.”
“How often is sometimes?” I persist.
“Enough to remain alive.” The phrasing is intentionally flippant.
My jaw tightens, and Julia notices immediately. “I wasn’t suicidal.”
“I know. Your intake was clear about that.”
“Then why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like I said something concerning.”
“You described keeping yourself alive as the standard rather than caring for yourself.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“No, Julia. It’s precise.” The use of her name stills her.
I keep my voice calm, even though irritation is beginning to move beneath my ribs. It isn’t directed at her. It’s for every useless asshole who watched her carry something unbearable and praised her for functioning instead of asking whether she could breathe beneath the weight of it.
“What happened when they found him?” I ask.
Her eyes lose focus. “The police asked for my DNA.”
The sentence changes the air between us.
Although the detail was included in her intake, hearing it in her voice strips away the clinical neatness of the written account.
She says it as if she’s standing outside the memory rather than inside it, but the pressure of her fingers around the bottle suggests otherwise.
“He’d been outside too long for visual identification,” she continues. “They needed to confirm the body was his.”
“And once they did?”
“I started planning the funeral.”
The way she said that, with a casualness that implied it was the normal thing to do, didn’t really match the pain that rippled through the calm green on her eyes, and it made me want to fucking punch through a wall.
It also made me painfully aware that the further we went into this session, my personal reactions were slowly taking over and I needed to find my way back to my usual calm and clinical behaviour.
“Your intake says you handled most of the arrangements yourself.” I bring it back to facts I know about her. The order of things will help me recalibrate.
“My mother wasn’t capable of doing it, and his girlfriend was grieving. Someone had to speak to the funeral home, choose the coffin, decide what he’d wear, call relatives, arrange food. It was mostly logistics.”
There it is. Pain being reduced to tasks because tasks can be completed, checked off, and controlled.
“Do you often turn difficult experiences into logistics?”
She gives me a long look. “Do you often ask questions when you already know the answer?”
“Yes.” I reply simply.
“Why?”
“Because what I notice isn’t always the same as what you understand about yourself.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It can be.”
“For both of us?”
“Probably.”
She almost smiles, but her attention drops before it fully forms.
“Everybody relied on you,” I continued. “You became the person who kept things moving while everyone around you was allowed to fall apart.”
“Someone had to handle things.”
“That seems to be a rule you live by.”
Her eyes lift toward mine. “It’s practical.”
“It’s also convenient for everyone except you.” That lands differently.
Her shoulders pull inward, and she crosses one arm over her stomach while the other keeps the bottle close to her body, gathering the sweater around herself as though fabric might shield her from attention. The movement is so familiar that my own memories rise before I can stop them.
My mother, standing in the kitchen with a bruise darkening beneath her jaw, stirring dinner with one hand while holding the other arm across her stomach.
She smiles when I ask what happened and tells me that she walked into the cabinet, then apologizes because the food has gone cold.
It disappeares as fast as it came but it stayed long enough to remind me that women who learn that being useful is safer than being needy always seem to move the same way when someone looks too closely.
That’s when something dark shifts beneath my barely retrieved control. No one should have allowed Julia to fucking learn it.
“Did anyone take care of you?” My voice comes out steady.
“Tessa was there.”
“hat’s good, but it isn’t answering the question I asked.” I push.
Her eyes lift defensively. “Then I don’t understand the question.”
“Who made sure you slept? Who checked whether you ate the food Tessa brought? Who sat with you after the identification, when the calls stopped and there was nothing left to organize?”
Her lips part, but no answer comes out. The silence stretches between us until the truth becomes impossible to avoid, and when she finally speaks, her voice is quieter than before.
“I was fine.”
“No, you weren’t.”