No Asylum Here (Madness of Two #1)

Chapter One

Tuesday

"Dr. Beckett, do you know why I called you into my office?”

I shook my head, barely registering the psychiatrist’s question. My attention was glued to the woman standing in the corner of Dr. Robert Braith’s office. Her skin was paper white, her wrists wrapped in bloody gauze. She gaped at me with an expression that had my stomach twisting into knots.

“Tuesday? Are you listening?”

Hearing my first name had my gaze snapping back to the gray-haired man behind the desk. His glasses were perched halfway down his nose, and he angled his head to glare at me over their tortoiseshell rims.

“I–I’m sorry, Dr. Braith. My mind is elsewhere.”

“That’s the problem. Your mind has been elsewhere for months.

” Braith was a stout fellow, the vest beneath his lab coat straining over his portly belly, buttons threatening to pop with the slightest movement.

He was also a respected psychiatrist with years of tenure.

I’d been so excited to land a mentorship with him fresh out of my psychiatric residency. And I was blowing it.

“I’m just tired,” I lied.

Leaning back in his chair, he took his glasses off, folded them, and placed them on his desk with a sigh. “It’s more than that, and you know it, Dr. Beckett. As I was saying, this position isn’t a good fit for you anymore.”

My heart bottomed out. “Wait, are you…?”

“Letting you go? Yes, I’m afraid so. As of today, you no longer work for Braith Psychiatry.”

My head whirled as it tried to parse that I was being fired. “But I—”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said with a curt tone that told me there was no changing his mind. “You’re to clean out your office, then a member of our security will escort you to your vehicle.”

My breathing turned short and sharp as panic set in.

This isn’t happening.

My eyes swung back to the corner of the room, where the young woman stood. The bandages on her wrists were swollen with blood, long overdue for a change.

“This is about Lauren Hawkins, isn’t it?” I swallowed, jerking with a shiver. Speaking her name, no matter how many times she came up in conversation or in insurance paperwork, had my stomach roiling with guilt.

Dr. Braith visibly tensed. “That’s a complicated question.”

I dug my nails into my thighs, the sting momentarily distracting me from the woman whose eyes watched me with an unblinking intensity. “It’s a yes or no, Doctor. I think that’s pretty damn simple.”

Braith’s eyes narrowed as his face turned pink.

He had the ego you’d expect from a middle-aged white man with framed degrees mounted on his wall over the bookcase containing the dozen or so books on psychology he’d authored.

“Death is inevitable, Dr. Beckett. As physicians, we do our best to delay it. That’s all we can do.

In the case of Ms. Hawkins, she was beyond our help… ”

I braced for the but.

“But the loss of your patient has driven you to madness, it seems.”

Madness. Ha.

My attention briefly flicked back to the woman.

Understatement of the fucking century, that.

“You need to get yourself help first before you can be trusted to provide sound help to others.”

I hated how right he was. I’d been out of it for weeks. I was hardly eating and had dropped a lot of weight in too short a period. I was zoning out during patient sessions. And now, the hallucinations…

It was silly, arguing with him when I knew I had this coming. Deserved it, even. I was a liability to his practice, to the patients. Frankly, it was a miracle his malpractice insurance rates hadn’t gone up since Lauren’s family lawsuit.

But I didn’t want to lose this job. Not when it had taken everything I had to get here. “If you give me another chance, I’ll get my shit straightened out, I promise—”

“I know you’ve been writing your own prescriptions,” the doctor snapped, cutting me off. “For a medication you have no business taking.”

I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it when no words came out. There was nothing to say. He was right.

How did he know? Fuck. He would have had to access my patient records to know that I’d been abusing my prescription pad, which was unethical as fuck. Then again, so was writing one’s own prescriptions.

Dr. Braith shook his head with a tut. “It’s a shame, really. We had such high hopes for you here. One of the top of your class at UCSF, with glowing recommendations from your supervising physicians. That was why I overlooked your age—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Robert.” I bolted up from my chair so fast, it tipped back, crashing to the ground. “If you’re firing me because of Lauren Hawkins or the pills, fine. But don’t bring my age into this. I worked my ass off to get my doctorate.”

He glared hot knives into me. “Perhaps you should have selected a different career; maybe Lauren Hawkins would still be alive.”

His words were a suckerpunch to my gut.

So there it was. Robert Braith did blame me for what happened to my patient.

Well, that made two of us.

I tried not to, at first. Tall order when every time I closed my eyes to sleep, I saw her face—looking at me with a desperation that struck me down to my bones.

Like I was the only one who could help her.

That’s when I started prescribing myself pain pills.

And it worked for a while. Until it didn’t.

Opioid-induced hallucinations weren’t an uncommon effect of the pills.

I stared at Lauren’s visage in the corner with a golf-ball-sized lump in my throat. “What do you want?” I asked her, my voice barely sounding like my own. “Go away.”

In my periphery, Braith jerked in the direction where my attention was glued. Of course, he didn’t see anything. “You’re not well, Dr. Beckett. You need help.”

“I–I’ll sue.” I whipped around to face him. “Digging through my medical records is illegal as fuck.”

“With what money?” He scoffed, bringing all his weight to his feet as he stood up with a grunt. “I’ll bury you in litigation fees. You’re lucky if I don’t call the state board to terminate your license. Now get the hell out of my office.”

On the next beat, the door swung open, and in walked the security guard. He stepped straight through Lauren.

With a blink, she was gone. My heart squeezed in my chest, and without any further argument, I followed the security officer out.

“I’ll give you a minute alone,” the security guy said, stopping just outside my door.

My office wasn’t as big as Dr. Braith’s, and other than my prescription pad, a box of stress toys I kept for patients to fiddle with during sessions, and a potted plant I’d nicknamed “Joanie,” there wasn’t anything else to pack.

Once I’d stowed everything in a cardboard file box, I turned back to the door and nearly dropped it all with a gasp.

There on the sofa against the wall sat Lauren Hawkins.

I squeezed my eyes shut and counted. One. Two. Three. When I opened them again, she was still there.

She looked just as she had the last time I saw her alive, sitting in that exact spot. The only difference now was the soiled bandages wrapping her slitted wrists and the hospital gown she wore instead of the leggings and hoodie I’d last seen her wearing.

“You’re not real,” I muttered beneath my breath. “You’re just a side effect of the pills.”

I walked past the couch to leave, but Lauren’s arm snatched out to capture the hem of my sweater. “Help us, Dr. Beckett.”

No. Impossible. The hallucinations had looked so real since they’d begun. But they’d never spoken to me or touched me. I felt her tug too, pulling on it so tight I heard threads snap.

“I–I can’t help you. You’re dead. I saw the coroner's report.”

The door opened, and the security guard looked around my office with confusion. Of course, he saw nothing but me, white as a sheet.

“Who are you talking to, Doctor?”

I shook my head and hurried past him. “No one. I’m ready to leave.”

Once I was in my car, I was shaking.

I had once considered myself unbreakable. As a foster kid with no family, not a penny to my name, who’d put everything into paying my way through med school, I had to be. But now, it all seemed like a waste.

I’d lost my job. My reputation, too, if Robert Braith had anything to say about it. I was already under a mountain of student debt, and now I had no severance pay or savings to support me until I found another job. If I could find another job.

The cherry on the shit cake was the manifestation of my guilt in the form of Lauren Hawkins, haunting me like a ghost.

I’d seen some fucked up shit in my life.

Especially in my residency. Sawed off limbs and gushing arteries, crushed bones and pus-filled infections.

During a shift in the ER, a man who’d been driving behind a semi-truck hauling rebar came in.

The load wasn’t probably secured to the truck bed, and a piece of rebar went straight through the man’s windshield, punching into his eyesocket, like something out of Final Destination. None of it had rattled me like this.

All I wanted was to stop seeing Lauren’s face.

There was only one thing that helped.

A sharp pang pulled under my gut as I reached into the box in my passenger seat. I pulled out my prescription pad and pen and scribbled down my own name.