Chapter 40
Anna pulls over a table from the corner before pouring everyone cups of tea, while Martina grabs a cookie from the plate and takes a big bite, the crunch so loud I flinch.
I put my mug back down on the table as the others sip from theirs. I don’t want to touch anything they would serve me.
“Doctor, do you want me to go get you a cup of rose hip tea from your office?” Anna is still pale, and I see, when she picks up the now-empty teapot, that her hand is shaking slightly. She grabs her wrist with her other hand, stilling it, and plasters on a smile.
“No, Anna, that’s all right.” Martina shoots her a thin smile. “I’m not very thirsty. Thank you, though.”
Anna exits the room, and Martina says, as though in casual conversation:
“Isn’t that nice of her? She knows I don’t care for lavender.”
No one responds. The silence hangs in the air, cold and oppressive, like a miniature version of the rainstorm outside, about to erupt.
Martina directs her attention back to Katarina.
“How are you feeling now, Kat?”
“I don’t like to be called that.” Katarina’s words are sharp and clear.
Martina smiles.
“Good,” she says. “That’s a good start.”
“No,” Katarina says. “Not a start. Talk to someone else. I don’t want to anymore.”
A hint of surprise flitters in Martina’s eyes. Gone again in an instant.
“All right.” Martina recovers. “Let’s take a beat so that you can gather your thoughts, Katarina. How about we go back to Isobel?”
Her head swivels.
“How are you feeling? You look stressed,” Martina observes.
Clara mutters something under her breath, and Martina looks over at her. It’s clear she expects Clara to speak up, but to my surprise, she clamps her mouth shut instead.
“Is there anything I should know?” Martina asks, clearing her throat.
She’s lost control of the room. She doesn’t like it.
The lights in the ceiling flicker.
“What the—” Leyla exclaims, but then they stabilize.
“You told us the electricity wouldn’t go out.” Pernilla’s face is pinched.
“It’s all okay.” Martina tries to calm us down, but she looks visibly distressed. “Even if the electricity did go, we have a backup generator. It will all be fine.”
“It doesn’t feel fine,” Leyla mutters.
“Anyway,” Martina says. “Isobel, let’s get back to you. I’d like to know how you feel now about this morning. About wanting to leave Himlafall.”
It’s clear she expects the others to have a big reaction to this, but no one responds.
“I feel fine.” I smile, showing as many teeth as I can muster. “Happy as a clam.”
Martina’s hands clench. Once, twice.
“You all seem unsettled,” she manages, looking around the room, turning the full force of her gaze on us. “Are there any questions I can answer for you? To help soothe your nerves?”
“Actually, Doctor”—Leyla raises her voice—“I do have a question.”
“About what?” Martina smiles.
“Is it true that someone has been going through our stuff?” Leyla asks.
Martina looks genuinely taken aback by this.
“Of—of course not,” she stammers. “Why would we do that?”
Her surprise looks real; none of the overly smooth, closed-off smugness I’ve come to expect from her. It startles me.
Leyla raises her eyebrows at me, wordlessly urging me on.
“Something was taken,” I admit. Martina is the last person in the world I feel like sharing this with, considering I’m fairly convinced she was involved, but if I want the others to see what I have seen I have to. “From my cabin. A couple of days ago.”
Martina visibly pales. The slight rouge on her cheeks attempts to conceal it, but I can see the color disappearing from her lips.
“Well.” She wets her lips with her tongue. “Maybe you misplaced it?”
I don’t know what to think.
Either she’s a better actress than I thought, or she’s … scared.
“I didn’t,” I say. “I’m sure.”
Dr. Martina opens her mouth, stays like that for a couple of seconds. It looks like she’s actually lost for words.
The rain is hammering against the roof, the walls, the windows; it feels like an intentional assault, like we’re under attack.
Like the woods and the skies have decided to rid themselves of this unnatural intrusion into their domain and use wind and water to tear it all down to the foundations, until the forest can take it all back, until there is no trace that any of us were ever here.
“I … wish you would have told a staff member, Isobel. We might have been able to help you look for what it was you lost.”
“I thought you had taken it.” I watch her closely, to see her reacting, but there is nothing: no guilt, no anger, no recognition.
She didn’t do it.
“Why would you think that?” Martina sounds baffled.
“Because it was a cell phone,” I say. “One I wasn’t supposed to have.”
Martina just shakes her head, gives a slight, gulping laugh, so very different from her usual pearly peals.
“You think you’re the first patient to take a phone in here? For fuck’s sake, Isobel, half our guests keep an iPad or a laptop. We don’t go through your bags. We’re not cops.”
She stares at me, her chest moving in short, shallow bursts.
“You didn’t take it.” I repeat it for confirmation.
“No one working here would ever violate your space like that,” Martina insists. “Himlafall is founded on the principle of trust.”
“Principle of trust?” Pernilla exclaims sharply. “Like how you tell everyone the personal things we’ve told you in private?”
Martina stands up from her seat and runs her hand over her face.
“Listen to me,” she says. “I understand that you’re all feeling unmoored and upset right now, but these accusations are ridiculous. This is a very strenuous process, but you all knew that when you came here.
“You came to Himlafall for a one-week therapy intensive. You are all getting the benefits of months and months of rigorous psychological treatment in seven days. That is going to be a somewhat painful experience!” Her voice cracks, and I hear a door being slammed shut in another part of the building; Martina jumps, and her eyes are drawn to the windows.
“No,” I say. “You’re not telling us everything.”
Martina looks to me, and now I see the fear writ large on her face.
“There’s someone here, isn’t there?” I get up on my feet. “Someone who isn’t supposed to be.”
Martina is silent. Her eyes flick from me, to Leyla, to Pernilla.
“The running of this clinic is none of your concern, and—”
“No,” Leyla interrupts her, standing up too. “It’s too late for that. You’ve got to tell us, Doc. What the hell is going on?”
Martina swallows, over and over again. I can see the muscles in her slim neck working compulsively.
“Nothing.” As though she can make it true by saying it. “Nothing at all. Now, I think that this has gone far enough. Clearly, you are all—”
“If we’re not safe here, we have a right to know,” Pernilla says. “So tell us.”
She is clutching her hands together rigidly, her posture absolutely perfect, and I can feel every ounce of social privilege working in her favor, pressuring an answer out of the doctor; it’s intense enough that I feel the urge to answer her myself.
Martina shakes her head, her hand flying up to her neck, to the little pendant hanging there, and for one long second, I feel a strange pang of kinship with her.
“Some things have gone missing,” she admits. “Patient files. But it’s nothing to worry about. None of your files are gone. I think one of the staff members working in the kitchen might have gotten into them, or maybe the cleaning crew. To sell to the press, perhaps.”
“Are you sure you didn’t take them, Isobel?” Clara raises her eyebrows. Her nostrils are flared, her pupils the size of coins; she’s trying to be mean, but her voice is high and frightened.
She wants it to be me, I realize. Because at least then she doesn’t have to be scared.
“Why would she have done that?” Martina’s confusion is turning back into anger.
I decide to get ahead of Clara and do my own dirty work.
“Because I’m a journalist,” I confess. “I came here to write an article about the Himlafall Clinic. And yes, I’ve looked at my own file. But I didn’t take any of them.”
Martina stares at me.
A beat passes. Two.
Then all hell breaks loose.
“I can’t believe you would come in here under false pretenses, violating the sanctity of—” Martina yells, her face twisting, as Leyla says:
“Guys, can we just—”
The lights go out, plunging us into darkness.
And then the screaming begins.
r/ActuallyLesbian
My ex is coming by to pick up her stuff and I’m scared
posted by: u/throwawayduckling123
18:16 09/17/2023
I don’t even really know what I’m asking, but I feel like I need help. Or maybe just emotional support. You’ve all been very kind to me before, and I don’t have anyone to talk to about this, so I came back here.
If you look through my old posts, you’ll see that I was in an abusive relationship. I didn’t realize it at the time. It was only when I sought help on here that people started to point out that the way my girlfriend was treating me wasn’t normal, or okay.
I wish I could say that I left when I realized what was going on, but it was so hard.
It was so, so hard. It was like my ex noticed me pulling away, and then she started showering me with affection.
Suddenly, it was like everything was back on track.
I’m ashamed to say that I thought that maybe I could stay with her.
She even proposed to me, and I said yes. I know it was stupid. I’m so stupid.
But after a while, it started getting bad again, and one night something in me just …
snapped. I don’t know what happened. We were sitting on the couch, and she was braiding my hair, and she commented that my scalp was dry.
She started talking about how I didn’t wash my hair often enough, and that it was embarrassing.
She said I smelled bad, and that other people could tell, too, and that they just weren’t telling me because they didn’t want to upset me, but that it was gross. She said I was gross.
It was such a small thing, compared to everything else.
And it might sound ridiculous, but … I know I don’t smell bad.
I’m very hygienic. I shower every evening before bed, and I floss twice a day, and I wash my hair with shampoo every two days.
It became so very clear to me in that moment that nothing had changed, and that she was just saying that to hurt me, and to make me feel insecure.
My mom (who has passed away) used to braid my hair for me when I was little.
It was just the two of us, and she worked two, sometimes three jobs, so there were days when I would only see her in the morning when she braided my hair.
And in that moment, I thought about how safe and happy I used to feel when I was little, when my mom was doing that, and how scared and small and disgusting I felt now.
And I just realized I couldn’t do it anymore.
So we broke up. I broke off the engagement. It got very ugly. I don’t really want to go into detail, but at least I didn’t have to go to the hospital.
My ex has been trying to talk to me ever since then.
I had to change my phone number because she wouldn’t stop calling.
For a while, she came over every day, just pounding on the door for hours.
I work from home, and I was terrified that my boss would hear and that I would get fired.
I thought about calling the police, but I was scared they wouldn’t take me seriously.
Or that they would believe her over me. She’s very pretty, and very charming.
I know I can come off as strange. I was scared that the police wouldn’t believe me if I said that she was harassing me, or that she had hurt me in the past. Luckily, I didn’t have to, because she finally stopped.
Yesterday, she left a note in my mailbox.
When I recognized her handwriting, I thought my heart would stop.
But in the note, she apologized for everything, and she asked if she could come over at seven tonight to pick up the things she left and say sorry in person.
She wrote that I don’t have to open the door for her, but that she loves me and that she just wants to end things on good terms.
She’s supposed to come over in forty minutes. My heart is racing, and I don’t know what to do. Please, don’t call me dumb for this, because I know I am, but a big part of me misses her. Despite everything. I think it would maybe be good for me to hear her say that she’s sorry.
Things went so wrong between us, but she’s been through a lot. I know she doesn’t mean to be like this, she’s just in pain. I know she loves me, and I hurt her. Do I maybe owe it to her to say goodbye, now that she’s calmed down?
4 upvotes
6 comments
u/MedusaInChains—18:16 09/17/2023
Do NOT open the door, and dont let her in. Is this the same girl who wanted to take you out into the woods??? Seriously, if she comes by, you should call the cops. They might not listen to you but they will probably scare her off!!!
u/BigBuxomButchBabe—18:19 09/17/2023
Sweetheart, trust someone who is speaking from experience: do not let this woman back in your life. You are not stupid for missing her, but she does not mean you well. This is just another manipulation tactic.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like your ex was not “only” emotionally abusive, but physically as well. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say she sounds dangerous.
Your instincts were very good when they told you to leave her. Your mom would be so, so proud of you. Make her proud again, and take care of yourself, and keep that door locked. You owe her nothing. Pain does not make someone abusive, nor does it excuse abuse.
u/HappyologyMaster—21:01 09/17/2023
OP, can u update us? i hope im not overstepping but i think i speak for all of us when i say were worried about u
u/BigBuxomButchBabe—07:39 09/18/2023
Second that, OP. No matter what happened, please tell us how it went last night. We’re here for you. You can DM me if you don’t feel comfortable discussing it in a public forum.
u/HappyologyMaster—16:20 09/26/2023
did she ever write to u? ive been checking this post every day for an update but i havent seen anything
u/BigBuxomButchBabe—19:03 09/26/2023
No. I haven’t heard anything. I’m telling myself that she maybe just didn’t feel like talking about it on reddit anymore, but I have to confess I’m horribly worried. I wish there was some way we could contact her. I have a really, really bad feeling about this.