Chapter 15 Sienna #2
"Me. From believing this is real. From believing someone like her could want someone like me.
" The words came out raw and she hadn't planned them and she couldn't take them back.
"Because if I can frame it as a professional violation, then it's a problem to be managed, not a relationship to be in.
And problems are easier. I know how to manage problems. I don't know how to be loved. "
The last three words sat in the room with a weight that pressed against her ribs. Sienna heard them and wanted to snatch them back and also wanted to say them again, louder, because they were true and she'd never said them to anyone.
Helen's eyes were warm. No pity in them. No alarm. Just steady, professional compassion.
"You said she gives you compliments and you can't accept them."
"My whole body rejects them. She tells me I'm beautiful and my first instinct is to argue.
She tells me I'm incredible and I assume she's being kind.
There's a voice in my head, my father's voice or my mother's voice or just the accumulated voice of a lifetime of not being told, that says I don't get to have this. "
Helen's pen rested against her notepad, still. "Get to have what?"
Sienna looked at the window. The lane below was empty, afternoon sun falling across the sandstone wall of the building opposite.
Her fingers tightened on the arm of the chair.
"Someone who looks at me the way Elise looks at me.
Someone who holds me while I cry and doesn't flinch.
Someone who knows what I look like naked and vulnerable and a complete wreck and still wants to be there in the morning. "
"But she was there in the morning."
Sienna's jaw trembled. "She was there in the morning."
Helen let the silence breathe. "And what did that feel like?"
"Like I was standing in a room that I'd been locked out of my entire life and someone had handed me the key.
" Sienna wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
The tears had arrived, quieter than the ones with Elise, but steady.
"I keep waiting for the catch. For the moment she realises I'm not worth it. "
Helen watched her with steady eyes. "Do you think she will?"
Sienna shook her head slowly. "The logical part of my brain says no. She's clear about what she wants. She's the most straightforward person I've ever met. She says what she means and means what she says and she's not playing games."
"And the part that isn't logical?"
"That part is still seventeen. On a tennis court. Wanting a girl and knowing that wanting had to be hidden."
Helen was quiet for a long while. Somewhere below them, in the physiotherapy clinic, a door closed and muffled voices spoke and went quiet again.
Sienna listened to the quiet in Helen's office.
It wasn't oppressive or loaded the silence at her parents' dinner table had been. Helen was giving her space.
"Tell me about the compliments specifically," Helen said. "What does Elise say?"
"She says I'm beautiful. She says I'm incredible.
She told me I'm gorgeous when I blush." Sienna's face warmed at the memory.
"She said she wanted to keep telling me until I believed it.
And my reaction every single time is to deflect or argue or change the subject.
She tells me I'm beautiful and I hear my mother's voice saying discipline matters more than appearance.
She tells me I'm worth looking at and I hear my father's silence, which always meant I should keep working harder. "
Helen wrote a single line on her notepad. "So Elise's words collide with your parents' programming."
Sienna nodded, her jaw tight. "Every time. She says something kind and I feel it hit and then I feel the rejection rise to meet it, like antibodies attacking a foreign body. My system has been trained to treat affection as an intrusion."
Helen reached for the tissue box and placed it on the arm of Sienna's chair.
Sienna took a tissue and pressed it against her eyes and laughed at herself, small and damp, because she was sitting in a therapist's office crying about being loved by a beautiful woman and there were worse problems to have.
"Here's what I want you to hear," Helen said.
"The professional boundary. You're a sports medicine physician in a hockey programme.
Elise is an adult athlete who is capable of making her own choices.
This isn't a psychiatrist sleeping with a patient in crisis.
The power dynamic is minimal and you both know it.
I'm not saying it doesn't matter. I'm saying it's not the barrier you're building it into. "
"Mara would—"
Helen waved a hand. "Mara would be fine. You know Mara."
Sienna did know Mara. She thought of Mara's relationship with Lex, the coach-player dynamic that was an order of magnitude more complicated than anything between Sienna and Elise.
Mara was Lex's direct superior. She controlled her playing time, her performance reviews, her career trajectory.
And Mara had navigated it with pragmatism and honesty and the support of her own team, and she was happy.
Genuinely happy. The kind of happiness that showed in the softening of her jaw and the light in her blue eyes when she talked about Lex, which she rarely did at work, but which was visible to anyone paying attention.
Sienna had been paying attention. She'd watched Mara balance the personal and the professional with a steady hand for months. If Mara could do that with stakes far higher than Sienna's, then the professional boundary Sienna was hiding behind was exactly what Helen said it was. A shield. Not a wall.
"The real work," Helen continued, "isn't about professional ethics.
It's about letting yourself be seen. You've spent your whole life perfecting the surface.
The competence, the calm, the control. And Elise is the first person who's gotten underneath it.
That's why you're crying in my office. Not because you crossed a line with a patient.
Because someone crossed a line with you, and you let them, and now you have to figure out what it means to be loved by someone who actually sees you. "
The words soaked in like water into dry soil, layer by layer, and somewhere beneath the fear and the shame and the forty-one years of careful self-containment, a knot loosened.
Not a dramatic unlocking. Not a wall crumbling.
Just a slight easing of tension that had been held so tight for so long she'd forgotten it was there.
"How do I do that?" Sienna asked. Her voice was quiet.
"You do what you're doing now. You talk about it. You let Elise in. You accept the compliments even when your brain tells you they're wrong. And you come back here and we keep working." Helen paused. "Can I give you one specific thing to try?"
"Please."
"Next time Elise tells you something kind about yourself, don't argue.
Don't deflect. Don't make a joke. Just say thank you.
Two words. Even if your whole body is screaming that she's wrong.
Even if your father's silence is deafening inside your head.
Just say thank you and let the words sit.
You don't have to believe them yet. You just have to stop fighting them. "
Sienna turned the idea over. Two words. It sounded simple. It sounded impossible.
"I'll try," she said.
Helen nodded once, slow and sure. "That's all I'm asking."
Sienna nodded. She pressed the tissue against her eyes one more time and then folded it carefully into a square, the corners neat and even, because some habits died harder than others.
"Same time next week?" Helen asked.
Sienna stood and smoothed the front of her blouse. "Yes. Please."
Helen smiled. It was the same smile she'd given Sienna on the first day they'd met, knowing and free of judgement.
Her body felt lighter. Not healed, not fixed, not transformed into someone who could accept love without flinching. But lighter. As if she'd been carrying a box she hadn't realised was heavy and someone had asked to hold it for a while.
She paused at the door. "Thank you, Helen."
"You don't need to thank me. You did the hard part. You showed up."
Sienna walked out into the narrow corridor.
Her reflection caught in the glass panel of the stairwell door, and she paused.
The woman looking back at her had red-rimmed eyes and blotchy cheeks and mascara that had survived the session by a miracle.
She looked wrecked. She looked honest. She looked like someone who had just said the truest things she'd ever said out loud.
She pushed through the door and went down the stairs, past the physiotherapy clinic and the bookshop with its coffee smell, and out into the midday sun.
The street was warm. Late morning had tipped into early afternoon and the light was golden and full, a coastal light that made even ordinary buildings look beautiful.
The sweet olive along the building's front wall released its scent in the heat, apricot-sweet.
A couple walked past on the far pavement, two women holding hands, and Sienna watched them without envy or longing for the first time she could remember.
She stood on the pavement and breathed in and the air tasted like salt. Helen's words were still settling.
The real work isn't about professional ethics. It's about letting yourself be seen.
She let them sit. She didn't argue with them.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She pulled it out. A text from Elise.
Looking forward to seeing you in Medical tomorrow. My shoulder's been behaving but I think it needs your hands on it. Just for professional reasons obviously.
Sienna smiled. The smile spread through her face and into her chest and down to her hands and she stood on the sun-warmed pavement holding her phone and grinning like an idiot and she didn't care.
She didn't care who saw. She didn't care if someone from the team walked past. She didn't care if her father's voice in her head told her to compose herself.
She was grinning on the pavement and couldn't stop, because Elise Moreno had texted her and the world was good and Helen Ward had seen her cry and not flinched and tomorrow she would put her hands on Elise's shoulder and call it professional and they would both know it was more than that.
She typed back: I'll be there. Purely professional hands only.
The reply came in seconds: Liar.
Sienna laughed. She put her phone in her pocket and walked toward the waterfront with the sun on her face and her shoulders lighter than they'd been in years.