4.
tell
Dr. Lark’s office smelled like Christmas all year long, cinnamon and clove pumping into the air from an essential oil diffuser shaped like a teardrop.
The diffuser was sandwiched between a bronze statue that Claire thought was supposed to be a ballet dancer and the complete hardcover works of Anne Rice.
Dr. Lark’s entire bookshelf was a carefully planned monument to relatability, something for everyone arranged in just such a way as to look authentically selected.
“So,” Dr. Lark said, settling into the leather chair across from the ubiquitous psychiatrist’s couch, “what’s new, Claire?”
The leather squeaked when Claire shifted her weight, a pillow wedged in her lap so she had something to occupy her hands. “Nothing, really,” she said.
It was the first time she’d lied in here by anything but omission.
Claire had wrestled with herself over it for the entire twenty-minute drive, whether she was going to tell Dr. Lark that Elias was dead.
It seemed weird that it was a thing she could choose to keep secret—death, ultimately, was just an interruption, a blip on a crowded radar.
Eventually, Claire supposed, she would have to call the receptionist at Elias’s office, let them know never to expect him back, that the hedge fund would have to go to someone else.
But for now, she lived in an in-between, where Elias’s end was something she held close and private.
A secret, and one that truly wouldn’t mean much to most other people, something they’d only think about for a day at most. Death was a storm you didn’t pay attention to until you were the one struck by lightning.
The only people who would truly understand were the Ashburys.
The letter about the funeral still sat on Claire’s cluttered coffee table, staring her down as she skulked around the house in the glow of the empty fish tank, drinking beer and watching the ceiling fan.
It’d shone like a square of light when she opened the front door to leave this morning, the sun hitting it just right, making the gilt edges gleam.
That was probably the moment she really decided not to tell, the rest of her inner turmoil little more than theater.
If she told Dr. Lark that Elias was dead, she would make all the right noises, perform impeccable doctorate-level sympathy, but she couldn’t understand.
And Claire didn’t want to deal with that.
She’d gotten so good at not dealing with things, why start now?
And because she wasn’t going to tell her that Elias was dead, she wasn’t going to tell her about the dream she’d had, either. About Elias hovering next to the laundry, coming closer, his yellow eyes and awful masklike face.
Dr. Lark shifted in her chair, crossing stockinged legs. “Is work going well? Last time we talked, you were chasing down an invoice. That has to be frustrating.”
“They paid up, finally.” Claire stretched a smile over her teeth. “But I definitely had anxiety dreams for a week about it.”
Here was how you played the game: Share a little, but not too much. Give a soft landing of vulnerability, but keep the foundation firm beneath.
It hadn’t always been this way. There had been a point in Claire’s life when she’d lent credence to the idea of healing.
A few years after the accident, when it was far enough behind her that she could function but not so far behind that she’d forced her mind to forget.
She’d been seeing a different therapist then, not Dr. Lark.
One provided by the state. When they suggested hypnosis to help her relive the accident and get some closure for the parts she couldn’t remember, Claire had agreed, and Aunt Margo had signed the permission forms without reading them.
But she’d remembered too much. The sea, a voice, the radio.
And that was when Claire started holding things back from therapists.
Started using them for the medicine that kept her functional, and nothing else.
Dr. Lark was little more than a Lexapro Pez dispenser, because to let her be more would be to remember things that Claire didn’t want to remember.
The aforementioned Lexapro Pez dispenser was now making a sympathetic noise and writing on her clipboard. “Did you try taking vitamin D along with your meds?”
“I did, and it’s helped.” For all her caginess about therapy, Claire followed every substance protocol to the letter. “I really think it was only about the invoice.”
Except that wasn’t really true. After the Elias dream, she’d had another, about the car that had followed her on the way home from the hospital. The headlights had kept getting bigger and bigger, until she was drowning in their bright-blue glow, choking on phosphorescence like it was seawater.
Dr. Lark nodded, then sat in silence, eyes gently expectant behind her glasses. She was good at this part. Making gullies of quiet that you felt you had to shovel in.
It worked, dammit. And this piece of her life, at least, was probably prudent to share with someone. “I think I was followed again,” Claire murmured.
Elegantly groomed brows drew down tight, gentle expectation giving way to worry. “Does it feel the same as before?”
Claire shrugged. The time when she had been followed—she refused to use the word stalked—was one of the few things she had been honest with Dr. Lark about, mostly because she was terrified.
Of course, she had no hard evidence, no texts or weird phone calls, nothing to suggest that her feelings had any basis in reality.
But Dr. Lark had taken it seriously despite that, maybe even because of it.
Helped Claire work through what the feelings might mean subconsciously, run tests to rule out other diagnoses.
She’d tried to help Claire get a police tail for a couple days, just to make sure there was no threat, but the department had made it clear that they wouldn’t really help until there was evidence of criminal activity, and maybe not even then.
It seemed like you had to get nearly murdered before they’d take it seriously.
Eventually—right before Claire met Elias, in fact—the feelings faded away.
The certainty that someone was always watching, that she was a fish in a very small, very observable bowl, was finally gone, and in its place was something like stability.
The possibility of it, at least. And Claire had clawed on with both hands, determined not to let it slither away.
Elias was the best thing that had ever happened to her. The only good thing.
Her throat went tight.
Sure, there had been the hit-and-run, years after the feeling of being followed had stopped, right before Elias proposed.
Sometimes she thought it was the reason he had.
Seeing her in her hospital bed, small and weak and bruised, had brought out a tenderness in him Claire hadn’t seen before.
In a twisted way, she was thankful for the hit-and-run. It made him love her more.
The only thing that had connected the accident to her previous stalking claim was that it had been a black car with blue headlights.
But there were lots of black cars with blue headlights, the officers said, and since the incident had taken place out of sight of their neighbors’ security cameras, there was no way to track the driver down.
Elias had been incensed, for a few days.
But then he’d seemed to accept it. Claire had recovered fine.
There were no lingering injuries. Really, the car had barely bumped her, just enough to knock her down.
It was her own fault for wearing noise-canceling headphones while walking.
The damage was done by her knocking her head on a driveway, not the car itself.
“Reoccurrences like this are usually brought on by a stressor,” Dr. Lark said, tapping her pen against her rose-pink legal pad. “Has anything important happened in the past couple days? Anything that might’ve mirrored that time in your life? Feeling… untethered?”
And Claire was a pro at this, Claire knew how to play this game. “No,” she said. “No, nothing.”
She stared at her reflection in Dr. Lark’s glasses for a small eternity, her therapist’s eyes narrowed, her lips pursed. “That’s odd,” Dr. Lark finally said, with a leading string attached to the edge of the word. One Claire refused to grab.
She checked her notes. “And nothing that might have reminded you of the accident?”
Dr. Lark was of the mind that the car that had run into Claire probably didn’t actually look like the one she’d thought was stalking her in college, but that Claire had conflated the two in her brain. Sometimes Claire almost believed it.
She shook her head.
Dr. Lark nodded. Then, casually: “And how have you and Elias been lately?”
Claire’s mouth hung open, leaking a tiny wheezing breath that was hopefully disguised by the hiss of the oil diffuser. Here was one more thing she had sometimes been honest about with Dr. Lark, and of course it was going to come bite her in the ass.
“I know you said at our last session that he seemed more distracted than usual.” Pursing her lips, Dr. Lark flipped back in her legal pad, though it was more for show than to consult her notes. “And that you were planning to talk with him about how you needed more emotional commitment.”
“I never said that,” Claire said, clutching the pillow tighter.
Dr. Lark had suggested that Elias’s reluctance to set a date was a sign of emotional unavailability, that she shouldn’t move forward with their engagement before she was sure he could be open and committed in the way she needed.
But Claire had never said such a thing. She was marrying Elias, whenever she could manage to make him nail down a date.
At least, she’d been going to.
A sardonic look over the top of her glasses as Dr. Lark shuffled back through the legal pad. “Have you given it any more thought?”
Claire shrugged, tightened her grip on the pillow.