Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
HARPER
The bedroom is too bright.
Anna must have opened the curtains at some point—probably when she brought in the tray of food I didn’t touch—and now afternoon light floods through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
I’ve been lying in bed for days.
I hate myself for it with a specific, focused hatred I recognize from only a few other particularly low points in my life.
My whole life I’ve been the woman who gets back up after she falls. Lost the shop because Z put us into debt that fucked all my savings, credit, and ability to continue my lease? Get back up. Car repossessed? Get back up and figure it out.
I have clawed my way back from nothing enough times that the scars have scars. Getting back up is the one thing I have always been able to do.
Except my body has apparently decided to stop cooperating.
When the soft knock comes, I don’t answer, but the door opens anyway. The woman who steps in is not Anna. She looks familiar, but I’m not sure from where. She’s pretty in an unfussy way—dark red curls, minimal makeup, and the kind of calm that reads as professional rather than performed.
“Harper. I’m Kira, Isaak’s wife. Remember me? We met at Helen’s memorial?”
I give a noncommittal shrug and go back to staring at the wall.
“I’m a therapist. May I sit with you for a bit?”
“Sure,” I say in a monotone. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”
She pulls a chair to the bedside and sits without making a production of it, setting a leather bag on the floor. She doesn’t open the bag or pull out a notepad. She just sits with her hands in her lap and looks at me as if she has all the time in the world.
“Domhnall mentioned you’ve been having a hard time,” she says.
“That’s one way to put it,” I sigh, my entire body feeling heavy as lead.
“How would you put it?”
The question catches me sideways.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know anything anymore. I feel like the floor dropped out from under me.”
She nods. “Tell me about that. What was the floor like before it dropped?”
I close my eyes, and I’m sixteen years old, sitting on Z’s ratty couch while Frank works the night shift and my mom is past conscious on the other side of the trailer park.
We’re eating cereal for dinner and he’s telling me about a motorcycle he saw, his eyes all lit up with that certain light he’d get when he thought about getting out.
He’s my one safe place.
If Mom’s latest boyfriend is sniffing around the door and the house smells like cigarettes and tequila bottles, there’s always one place I can go. Z’s room. Surrounded by Z’s certainty that we’re going to get the hell out of here one day.
I swallow hard, then look up at the redhead. Then back at the wall.
For a long time I don’t say anything. Then I try, stumbling over my words, to explain the situation. I start with the last few days and she listens, asking questions here and there.
She’s a good listener. And maybe I did need to talk to someone after all, because suddenly it’s pouring out.
“Z was my only safe place for a long time,” I finally say after maybe fifteen minutes, and my voice comes out rough. “When I had no one and nowhere, there was him. He used to say it was me and him against the world, and I believed that. I believed it all the way deep down.”
“And now that’s gone,” she says gently.
“Worse. Now I found out it was never real.” The words taste like copper pennies.
“He lied. He spent ten years manipulating me so carefully that I couldn’t see it—” My voice breaks off in a choke at all the shocking revelations that have hit me in waves the past few days.
“He made sure I stayed small enough that I’d never look too hard or ask too many questions.
Or feel like I deserved more than what he was giving me. ”
My hands find the edge of the duvet, and I’m pressing my thumbs into the fabric hard enough to feel the seam. “And I let him. I can’t get past that part. I let him do most of it.”
“Did you?” Kira’s voice is neutral, not challenging.
“I should have seen it,” I say bitterly. “The way I was raised? I should have seen it a mile off. My dad was a con man, for fuck’s sake.”
“What would seeing it have required of you?”
“I don’t—” I stop, confused. “What do you mean?”
“You said you let him. I’m asking what it would have taken, specifically, for you to have seen it sooner. What would that version of Harper have needed that you didn’t have?”
The question sits there and I don’t know what to do with it.
“Evidence,” I say finally. “I would have needed evidence. I’m not the kind of person who throws away ten years on a feeling.”
“But he made sure you didn’t have evidence.”
“He made sure I didn’t have evidence,” I repeat, and something in the repetition of it, in hearing it as a sentence about his behavior rather than my failure… it does something I wasn’t expecting.
My throat feels tight. “That’s—yes. That’s exactly what he did.”
“That’s called coercive control,” Kira says plainly. “It’s not a character flaw in the person it’s done to. It’s a deliberate strategy. It works precisely because it targets people who are loyal and give the benefit of the doubt to those they love.”
I press my thumbs harder into the seam of the duvet.
“Is there something more?” Kira asks, and her voice shifts register, very slightly. Not harder, but more precise. Like she’s adjusting an instrument. “Something you haven’t been able to say out loud yet?”
I don’t answer.
“In my experience,” she says, “when someone survives what you’ve survived, there’s usually a specific thing. Not the big narrative thing—not the betrayal or the gun he held on you or even the years of control. I’m talking about the thing that was always underneath.”
The room is very quiet.
Outside, distantly, I can hear Bruiser’s high-pitched laughter echoing. His laugh, which has always been the sound that pulls me back from the edge.
Kira’s silence is the loudest thing I’ve heard in days.
Not because she says the word I suspect we’re both thinking. She doesn’t. She just goes on to ask, very quietly, what I would call it if it had happened to someone else. A best friend, maybe.
If I was sitting where she’s sitting and a woman told me that story of the hotel room, the repetitive shots in a plastic cup tipped to her lips, and the moment she went under—what word would I use?
I stare through the window and I don’t answer.
“Harper.”
“I’m thinking,” I say.
“Take your time.”
The thing about Kira is that she means it.
She’s not running a clock on me. She is sitting in that cushioned chair with the patience of someone who has done this enough times to understand that the answer will come when it comes.
Maybe it’s like a broken bone knitting itself back together—you can want it done faster all you like, but the tissue doesn’t give a shit what you want.
I’ve been calling it bad sex for ten years.
That first time, it was just bad sex I was too drunk to remember. And it was my fault. We were homeless and I got drunk. And he’d been taking care of me and I owed him something for that, didn’t I?
After that, it was just bad sex that happened and then kept happening.
Eventually, I quietly enforced the one boundary I could manage—condom—and called that self-preservation and moved on giving him what he wanted. What I still owed him.
A loving partner would give her body to fuck however he wanted after he got home from those long hauls. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt like it was my fault for not loving him the way he wanted.
So I owed him my body at least. And if he was rougher than I liked… well. It was my fault I never came when we had sex. My fault I was so dry for him.
I only said I didn’t want to—to stop—a couple of times… and he kept going anyway.
Maybe more than a couple.
Who kept track of these things?
I told myself that story for all those years, and it worked fine, mostly.
It worked until the dream in this house two nights ago showed it to me with edges.
Until I watched her—me, but small, so desperately small and young.
And I watched him tip the cup to her lips when she stopped taking it herself. And I watched her go under, and I watched him check that she was out before he did whatever he wanted to her unconscious body.
If a friend told me that story, I wouldn’t call it bad sex. Just like I wouldn’t call bad sex what happened later in the relationship.
“I don’t want to use that word,” I whisper.
“I know,” Kira says. “We don’t have to use it today. But I want you to notice what happens in your body when you consider it.”
I notice my throat closes up.
My hands are gripping the duvet so hard my knuckles have gone white, and I didn’t realize I was doing that until just now.
There’s a weight on my sternum that’s pressing down and inward like I’m suffocating, and I think it was there every time he touched me. Subconsciously screaming even though I always pushed it away because I didn’t think it was logical. I was a woman giving him what he deserved as a man.
“When he locked me in that closet and then held the gun on me and Bruiser, I was so angry. I was furious, and I thought—I thought that was the worst thing.” My voice gets squeaky at the end as tears crowd my eyes.
“And now?” Kira says.
“Now I think that it’s not the worst of it,” I say, the tears flooding down my cheeks. “And that’s too hard to sit with. I trusted him. He was the one person I trusted.”
Kira nods. She doesn’t rush to reframe it or make the bad things smaller. She just nods, which is the only response, and I’m unexpectedly grateful for it.
“Can I ask you something?” I say after sobbing for several quiet minutes, finally wiping my nose.
She hands me a Kleenex. “Of course.”
“Caleb—” I stop. I try again. “When Caleb touches me, it’s—”
I look at my hands. “He always asks. Or he waits until I make the first move. He never pushes into space I haven’t opened. I knew I liked that about him, but I thought it was just—how he’s built, the way he was raised, you know?”
I dare a quick glance up at her, then away again. “But now I keep thinking that maybe my body knew something my brain wasn’t ready to name yet. That’s the reason his asking felt so—” I search for the word. “So enormous—so out of proportion—is because I haven’t been asked in a very long time.”
Kira is quiet for a moment.
“That’s a really profound observation,” she says, and she means it. I can hear she means it. “Our nervous systems can keep score even when our conscious minds aren’t watching. The contrast with Caleb wasn’t just pleasant. It was information your body had been waiting for someone to give it.”
The thought lands and keeps landing, reverberating deeper each time.
This is why every time with him has been so destabilizing.
For the first time in longer than I can accurately remember, the wanting felt so clean and uncomplicated that it showed me by contrast exactly what the ten years before it wasn’t.
I wasn’t ready to see it.
I still might not be ready.
“I don’t know how to let him touch me right now,” I say, and the honesty of it surprises me, how plainly it comes out after so much cloudiness. “I want to. And I also can’t. And I don’t know how to hold both of those things at the same time.”
“That’s a completely reasonable place to be,” Kira says, voice full of empathy. “Your body is doing exactly what it should be doing. It’s protecting you while you process. That doesn’t have to be permanent, but you also don’t have to rush yourself. Healing takes time. That’s perfectly okay.”
“What if it is permanent, though?” I ask, and there it is: the question underneath all the other questions, the one I haven’t said out loud yet. “What if I’m too broken now? What if I’m the kind of damaged that’s not… fixable?”
Kira’s expression shifts, very slightly. Not with pity, but something more like recognition. “Harper, the fact that you can name your fear is evidence that you’re not too broken. The people who are too broken don’t ask the question. They’ve stopped believing the answer matters.”
I look at her.
“You aren’t unfixable,” she says. “You’re a person who survived things she was never supposed to survive, and your brain is doing exactly what brains do after surviving. It’s processing. Rewiring. Brains are amazing that way. They can build a new map from the wreckage of the old one.
“There’s no rush, Harper. You’ve been through immense trauma, and it’s okay to give yourself permission to heal.” She smiles wryly. “I can tell you’re impatient—”
I roll my eyes. “Is it that obvious?”
She laughs gently and puts a hand on the bed. “Give yourself time. I’ll stop by tomorrow. In the meantime, whenever it feels right, try to take a walk. Go for a swim. Getting your body moving can help loosen your mind.”
She stands up and stupidly, I want to beg her to stay. Being alone in this cocoon of a bed has felt like the only safe place the past couple of days, but now it sounds terrifying to be left alone with just my own mind and all its demons.
“You’ll be back tomorrow?” I double-check, and then immediately feel childish.
She just smiles again, and I’m sure I’m not the first patient who’s wanted to cling to her like a koala after a first breakthrough session.
“Tomorrow.”
After the door closes behind her, I lie there for another twenty minutes, psyching myself up. And then I dare step a foot out of bed.