Chapter 15 Sienna
SIENNA
Helen's office was on the second floor of a sandstone building three blocks back from the waterfront, above a physiotherapy clinic and a bookshop that smelled of coffee and old paper.
Sienna had walked past it dozens of times without going in.
She'd known the office was there, known it was available, known that Helen had told her more than once that her door was always open.
She'd never opened it.
The drive across town had taken twelve minutes.
She'd counted the traffic lights. Four green, two red, one amber she'd accelerated through because sitting still felt impossible.
Her hands had gripped the steering wheel at ten and two, knuckles white, as she used to hold her tennis racquet before a serve, and her mouth had been dry the entire drive.
She'd parked in the small lot behind the building, turned off the engine, and sat in the car for another six minutes, watching a cat doze on the bonnet of a silver hatchback in the next space.
Then she'd gone inside.
The waiting area was small and painted a warm grey.
Two armchairs, a low table with a jug of water and two glasses, a framed print of the coastline that could have been anywhere.
No receptionist. Helen ran her own practice, saw her own clients, managed her own diary.
Sienna sat in the armchair closest to the window and pressed her hands flat against her thighs and tried to stop her knee from bouncing.
She had never sat in a therapist's waiting room before.
Not as a patient. She'd referred athletes to sports psychologists, discussed treatment protocols with Helen over coffee, read clinical literature on cognitive behavioural therapy and trauma-informed care with the same detached interest she brought to any professional development.
But she had never been on this side of the door.
The side where you were the one with the problem.
The problem. She turned the word over in her head, examining it as she'd examine an X-ray, looking for the fracture line.
What was the problem, exactly? That she'd slept with a patient?
That the sex had been so overwhelming she'd cried in front of another person for the first time in twenty years?
That she'd woken up in Elise Moreno's bed with the morning light on her skin and the taste of Elise still in her mouth and the terrifying, absolute certainty that she was falling in love with someone she was supposed to be treating?
All of the above.
She'd left Elise's apartment late yesterday morning, after breakfast, after more kissing, after standing at the door unable to stop touching Elise's face while saying goodbye.
She'd driven home in a daze and showered and stood under the water for twenty minutes staring at the tiles.
Then she'd picked up her phone and texted Helen.
_Can I book a session? A proper one. Not coffee._
Helen had replied within minutes. _Tomorrow at ten. I'll clear the slot._
No questions. No surprise. Helen had probably been waiting for this text for months.
The office door opened. Helen stood in the doorway in her usual uniform, dark trousers, grey cardigan, the chin-length dark hair threaded with silver framing a face that was calm and watchful. She smiled.
"Come in."
Sienna stood. Her legs were unsteady, which was absurd. She performed examinations on professional athletes. She'd relocated shoulders and stitched lacerations and made split-second calls on concussion protocols while twenty thousand people watched. She could walk through a door.
She walked through the door. Her palms were damp and she wiped them against her trousers, a nervous habit she thought she'd trained out of herself years ago on the junior tennis circuit in San Diego.
Helen's office was simple. Two armchairs facing each other at a slight angle, a desk by the window that she clearly didn't use during sessions, a bookshelf, a box of tissues on the side table.
The window overlooked a narrow lane planted with sweet olive, the apricot scent drifting in through the cracked glass.
Sienna sat down and placed her hands in her lap and folded her fingers together because otherwise she would start picking at the hem of her shirt.
Helen sat in the opposite chair. She didn't have a notepad. She wasn't recording anything. She crossed one leg over the other and regarded Sienna with an expression of gentle attention.
"So," Helen said. "You're here."
"I'm here."
"What brought you?" A pause. "And before we start, I know this is unusual. Me being your friend and doing this. If you'd prefer someone else, I have colleagues I trust. But if it’s me you want, that’s fine.”
"I'd rather it was you," Sienna said.
"Good. Then let's talk."
Sienna opened her mouth and closed it again. She'd rehearsed this in her car, sitting in the car park, running through the words she would use. Clinical words. Clean words. Words that would explain the situation without exposing the rawness underneath. She'd had the sentences ready.
They disintegrated the moment Helen looked at her.
"I've been sleeping with Elise," Sienna said. The words came out flat and bare and nothing like the careful explanation she'd planned.
Helen's expression didn't change. The same calm regard, the same slight tilt of her head.
"Tell me about that," Helen said.
"I don't know where to start."
"Start anywhere. There's no wrong place."
Sienna looked at the tissue box on the side table and then at the narrow lane outside the window and then at her own hands in her lap, the fingers woven together, the scar on her left thumb from the scalpel slip during her residency. She took a breath.
"It started with the injury. Her shoulder. I'm her physician. I've been treating her for four weeks, hands-on rehabilitation every day, and at some point the line between doctor and patient started to blur. And then it didn't blur anymore. It just disappeared."
Helen tilted her head. "When did it disappear?"
"Saturday night. Two nights ago." Was it only two nights?
The timeline felt compressed and impossibly stretched at the same time.
"She kissed me. Or I kissed her. Both. On a bench by the ocean.
And then we went back to her apartment and.
.." She trailed off. Heat climbed her neck and flooded her cheeks, and she was forty-one years old and turning pink in a therapist's office.
"You had sex," Helen said, as if it were the most unremarkable sentence in the world.
"Yes." Sienna pressed her palms flat against her thighs.
Helen crossed her legs and waited. "And how was that?"
Sienna let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-exhale.
"Life-changing. That's not hyperbole. Something happened to me that I didn't know could happen.
Physically and emotionally. I cried. During.
After. I haven't cried in front of another person since I was.
.." She stopped. When had she last cried in front of someone?
She couldn't remember. Her parents' house hadn't been a place for tears.
"You cried," Helen said.
"Like a wall came down."
Helen was quiet. She let the silence sit between them, unhurried. Outside, a bird landed in the lane. Sienna's knee was bouncing again and she pressed her hand against it.
"Can we talk about what you think broke open?" Helen asked.
Sienna nodded. She knew what it was. She'd been turning it over since yesterday, examining it from every angle with the same analytical rigour she applied to diagnoses, and she'd arrived at a conclusion she didn't like.
"I've been shut down," she said. "For a long time.
Nothing dramatic, no single event, no specific wound.
My parents loved me in the way they knew how, which was quiet and structured and focused on achievement.
There wasn't a vocabulary in our house for the rest of it.
For wanting, or being seen, or saying out loud what you actually felt.
I learned to put all of that in a box and I got very good at keeping the lid on. "
She looked at the tissue box. "I thought I was fine. I'm forty-one. I've built a career. I have a flat with an ocean view. I wake up and I do it again. I was fine."
"And then Elise."
Sienna's throat tightened. She pressed her thumbnail into the side of her index finger. "And then Elise."
Helen waited.
"She looked at me like I was worth looking at. That sounds pathetic."
"It sounds honest." Helen's voice was quiet, without pity, the same tone she used when she wanted Sienna to keep going.
"She told me I was beautiful and I literally couldn't accept it.
My brain rejected the information. And then she.
.." Sienna pressed her fingers against her eyes.
The tears were close to the surface, treacherous, ready to break through.
"She touched me and I came apart. Years of keeping everything locked down and one woman with calloused hands from holding a hockey stick broke all of it open in one night. "
"What did it feel like?"
Sienna's breath shook. "Terrifying. And the most alive I've ever felt."
The clock on Helen's desk ticked in the quiet. Helen leaned forward slightly. "Sienna, can I be direct with you?"
"Yes."
"The professional boundary you mentioned. Between you and Elise. How much of your distress about that is genuine ethical concern, and how much is a shield?"
Sienna stared at her. The question was surgical.
"Both," she said after a moment. "But the shield is bigger than the concern."
"What's the shield protecting?"