28. Kai
Kai
The stairwell door slams somewhere beyond reception.
I hear it even through the open door of my office, followed by silence so abrupt that for several seconds I remain exactly where Julia left me, sitting in the chair across from the one she occupied for months.
The office looks exactly the same as it did when she walked into it less than an hour ago.
The afternoon light still reaches across the rug in a pale strip beneath the windows, my notepad is on the floor where it slipped from my knee at some point during the conversation, and the bottle of water Mara brought in earlier sits untouched on the small table between the chairs.
Nothing has changed and everything has. I look down at my hands.
My cuffs are perfectly buttoned. That almost makes me laugh.
Almost. Less than an hour ago I pulled those sleeves down with the ridiculous instinct of a man trying to hide evidence after the person standing in front of him had already seen it.
My suit is still perfectly arranged, tie straight, shirt tucked, every fucking piece of me outwardly intact, and yet I have never felt less put together in my life.
The door in front of me moves. I don’t. Mara steps inside without knocking, then closes it carefully rather than leaving it open the way Julia did.
For several seconds, she says nothing. I know what she heard.
Julia wasn’t exactly whispering by the end, and the distance between my office and Mara’s desk is nowhere near enough to preserve privacy once somebody is standing beside an open door telling her psychiatrist that if he ever comes near her house again, she will report him.
Normally, Mara’s silence irritates me because she uses it with far too much skill for someone who enjoys accusing me of doing the same thing professionally. Today I’m grateful for it. I lean forward and brace my elbows against my knees, pressing both hands over my face.
“What happened?” The question is quiet.
I drag my hands down slowly but still don’t look at her. “I’m really not in the mood for a lecture.”
A pause follows before Mara lets out a breath.
“Oh, I got that part.” Her voice carries none of its usual humor when she adds, “Sounds like you already got one from Julia.”
I close my eyes. Even hearing her name feels like something sharp being pushed beneath my ribs. Mara crosses the room but doesn’t sit in Julia’s chair. Instead, she takes the edge of the couch farther to my left, leaving enough distance that I don’t have to look at her unless I choose to.
“I’ve been watching you for weeks, Kai.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.” There is no accusation in the statement, only tired confirmation. “The way you looked every time she walked out. The rides after her appointments. You disappearing on nights when I knew damn well you had paperwork stacked on your desk.”
My stomach knots tighter.
“I kept hoping I was wrong,” she continues. “Or that if I wasn’t, you would eventually remember that you’re supposed to be smarter than whatever the hell was happening in your head.”
That makes me look at her for the first time since she came in.
Mara’s expression is not angry in the way I expected.
That might be worse. She looks disappointed and Mara looking disappointed sits right up there with the same types of looks Henry would give me when I would do something that elicited that emotion.
It wasn’t often, but I fucking hated it then and I fucking hate it now.
“I didn’t sleep with her because I forgot the rules.” I manage.
Her eyebrows lift. “That is not the defense you think it is.”
“It isn’t a defense at all.” The answer seems to stop whatever she was about to say.
I sit back and stare toward the window, though there is nothing outside that registers beyond vague shapes and afternoon light.
“There isn’t an explanation I can give you that makes it acceptable.”
“Try me anyway.” Mara’s motherly tone? Fucking hate that too.
I rub my thumb against the inside of my palm, feeling the faint indentation where my nails have been pressing without me realizing it.
“The second session with her went badly. We went into her mother, she dissociated, and when she left…” I stop because I can still see Julia through the windshield of her car, eyes fixed on the road while some part of her was nowhere near it. “She looked like my mother.”
Mara’s expression changes immediately, but I shake my head before she can misunderstand.
“Not like that. Jesus. I don’t mean Julia reminds me of my mother. I mean the look on her face did.”
Understanding replaces the confusion. I turn back toward the window.
“My mother used to disappear without going anywhere. She could cook dinner, wash dishes, answer me if I asked her something, but there were nights after he’d been at her where she wasn’t really in the room anymore.
I knew that look years before I knew what dissociation was.
” My throat tightens around the memory. “And she was always fine. Bruises under her sleeves, split lip, staring through the wall like there was something better on the other side of it, and if anybody asked, she was fine. People believed her because believing her meant they didn’t have to do anything.
Eventually most of them stopped asking.”
Mara watches me quietly.
“Julia walked out of this office looking exactly like that and told me she was fine.”
“So you followed her.”
“Yes.” The word tastes like shit.
“I told myself I was making sure she got home safely. At the time, part of me probably believed it.” I lean forward again, looking at my hands because I don’t deserve the relief of looking anywhere else. “Then she got home. She was safe. That should have been the end of it.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No.”
What followed sounds worse when reduced to facts, which is probably appropriate. I stayed. I returned. I watched her. I wrote to her. I let myself become somebody she chose without telling her that she had never been given all the information necessary to make that choice.
“The first time it was concern,” I say. “Everything after that was me finding better excuses for something I wanted.”
Mara is silent for a while before asking, “Why her?”
A humorless breath leaves me. “You’ve spent the last six years blocking women from the office line. You tell me.”
“Exactly my point. You have never had a shortage of women willing to sleep with you, Kai. I have blocked enough numbers from women trying to turn psychiatric scheduling into Tinder to prove that.” Her mouth tightens.
“So why risk your license, your practice and apparently this woman’s trust when you could have gone home with practically anybody else? ”
“Because I didn’t want anybody else.” The answer spills out of me without thinking because it’s the absolute truth. From the moment I laid eyes on her… it was her.
Mara absorbs it. I hate how pathetic it sounds.
“I wanted her,” I continue, quieter now.
“Not when she first came to me in that state, obviously. But right after I followed her that first night. I was worried about her, and then I saw things I had no right to see and I should have fucking left. Instead, I went back. The letters came after that, and every line I crossed made the next one easier to explain to myself.”
“And then she wanted Ghost.”
My jaw tightens. “Yes.”
I remember the lamp glowing in her window, the door she left open, her voice saying Ghost beneath me.
The way she slept tucked against my chest. Every memory that felt like something precious yesterday now has another version underneath it, one where Julia didn’t know the man touching her had already sat across from her while she described the worst moments of her life.
“She trusted him,” I say, and my voice sounds rough even to me. “She trusted me too, just for completely different reasons, and I let her believe those trusts belonged to two different men.”
Mara’s gaze drops briefly. “That’s the part you’re stuck on.”
“It’s the part that matters.”
Not the disciplinary hearing that will almost certainly follow. Not the practice or my fucking reputation. Not even the license I spent half my life earning. I would burn it all I if that meant having her. But even if I did, it would change the fact that I have lost her.
Julia sat in that chair and told me things she had never told anyone because she believed professional boundaries meant I would never use access to her vulnerability for anything else.
Then she gave Ghost parts of herself because she believed he was separate from the man holding those secrets.
Whatever my intentions had been, I stole the distinction.
I stole the information she needed to decide what belonged to whom.
I stole her right to choose when that was exactly what I had been working so hard with her all the last couple of months — for her to understand that she has that right.
“She said I used everything she told me to get a good fuck.” The words barely make it out.
Mara winces. “Did you?”
“No.”
There is finally something immediate in my answer because that accusation is the one thing I cannot let settle into truth simply because I deserve the rest.
“No. Never.” I rub a hand over my jaw and feel how badly it is shaking. “I never took something she disclosed in therapy and turned it into a way to get her into bed. I never sat here listening to her trauma because I was building some fucking blueprint for Ghost.”
“But she has every reason to wonder whether you did.”
“Yes.” That is the part that fucking kills me.
Intent means nothing when the person you harmed has no reason left to trust your version of it.
Mara stands and walks toward me, stopping close enough that I finally look up. “I came in here ready to tear you a new asshole.”
“I assumed.” I nod.
“Then I saw your face.” Her voice softens.
“That bad?”
“Worse.”