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“I’m not buying it,” she retorts, still suspicious of my intentions.
“Try me and see. What do you have to lose?”
“Fine. Why were you in therapy?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I answer without hesitation.
“You’ll need to give me more than that.” She giggles, the sound of her laughter filling the empty hole that my chest has been carrying for the past month.
“Fine,” I relent. “When Rex first gave me the job as GM, I felt like I needed to prove my worth and fast. You probably don’t know this, but there were a lot of other general managers in line for the job. Big names with a plethora of experience behind them. Rex choosing me to head his team was a shock to a lot of people. Especially the die-hards that believed I was too green for the challenge.”
“I remember,” I hear her whisper from inside.
I rub my chest with my fist, thankful she can’t see me right now.
“The odds had been stacked against me from the start, so I knew that for people to take me seriously, I needed to make sure I had a winning team. Those first few years were extremely difficult for me. So much so that I wasn’t able to sleep at night. I would go two, even three days, without so much as a nap, running on fumes and adrenaline alone. Then, one day, I collapsed from exhaustion right in Rex’s office.”
“I didn’t know that happened to you,” she says sympathetically.
“No one did. Rex made sure to keep it all under wraps with one stipulation—to see Roxanne so I could get a grip on the situation.”
“Roxanne?” Piper interrupts. “As in Dr. Roxanne Seymour? The same shrink Nathan is seeing?”
“The one and the only.” I smile.
“And did it help? Therapy, I mean?”
“It did. Until it didn’t. So I stopped going,” I admit.
“Why? Why did you stop?” Piper asks, genuinely invested in my story.
“Because she said something I didn’t agree with.”
Now that I look back at it, maybe the good doctor was onto something.
Perhaps she saw the writing on the wall before I did.
Fuck.
Maybe, like Rex, she figured out the truth before I realized it myself.
Damn it.
I’ll never live it down once she finds out.
“Well, that sounds ominous,” Piper interjects, pulling me out of my reverie. “What did Dr. Seymour say that would cause you to stop going to therapy?”
“She said that I had obsessive tendencies.”
“You mean like OCD?”
“No, nothing as severe as that.” I smile when I hear Piper glide down her door and lean against her side of it. “It’s just that I have a tendency to obsess over things and only rest until I’ve achieved the desired outcome I envisioned. She said that my obsession with wanting a better life for myself gave me the fortitude to get out of Roxbury. It’s also the reason why I was unable to sleep when I first started working for Rex. My mind just refused to allow me any rest until I made good on all my promises to him. And the reason why I ended our therapy sessions is because she believes my obsessive-compulsive nature found a new obsession, one that she doesn’t think is healthy for my mental well-being.”
“What is it?” Piper asks, hanging onto my every word.
“It’s not a what, Piper. It’s a who.”
It doesn’t take her long to realize who I’m talking about.
