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I lean forward to grip the edge of her desk. “But, was it a…” I mouth, “Werewolf?”
She sighs. “I can’t tell you that.”
My knuckles turn white as I tighten my grip. “But it was in my woods. Steps away from my house.”
“I realize that.” She stands and walks around to pull up the other chair in the room and positions it to face me. “That must have been very hard for you after what happened with your mother. How did you sleep last night?”
The question makes me twitch. Not well, even after Haut smothered me with cuddles, but I’m not here to be shrinked.
I’m here for answers. “We’re not talking about my sleep. We’re talking about the You Know What.”
Dr. Lopez gives a knowing nod. “So, you’re not sleeping well then. Are you having nightmares?”
“No.” When she stays silent, her kind brown eyes fixed on me, I fidget. “I thought I heard noises in the attic, but Haut says we don’t have rats.”
She crosses her legs. “What else?”
I shake my head. “That’s it.”
Dr. Lopez folds her hands in her lap. “Trauma like what happened yesterday, so much like what you experienced in your youth, could have triggered a return of your hallucinations. As we discussed before, you could experience relapses in episodes from the medicine you were taking.”
I nod, though I’m still not sure I was hallucinating.
“How has your sleep been otherwise?” she prods. “Any nightmares?”
“A few,” I admit reluctantly. “But I don’t remember them when I wake up.”
“How do you feel when you wake up?” she asks.
“Uneasy.” I pick at my nails. “Like I’m not safe in my house.”
Sympathy fills her face. “Why do you think you’re having dreams that leave you feeling that way?”
It’s a leading question, but all of her questions are like that. The answer lies inside me, if I want to dig it out. But does giving something voice really make it easier to move past?
And how did this turn into a counseling session when I came here to talk about the body in her back room?
She tries a different angle. “After what happened before, why did you choose to come back to Hartford Cove?”
“Because we had nowhere else to go,” I say, more comfortable with this line of questioning. “With his curse, Tris couldn’t work, and I’d never had a job. Bryant controlled my dad’s bank account, so we had no money. Grandma’s house was the only place I could think of that might give us shelter until we figured something out.”
She uncrosses and recrosses her legs. “You never planned to stay, though, did you?”
I pluck at a string on the hem of my oversized sweater. “No, coming here was supposed to be temporary.”
“Because you don’t feel safe here?”
The question hangs in the air between us, and silence fills the room, pressuring me to fill it.
My shoulders hunch. “I have Tris, Haut, Owen, and Ambros. How could I not be safe?”
“But Owen couldn’t stop your mother from dying.”
My head snaps up. “He was just a kid.”
“And Haut’s jealousy scared you into fleeing.”
“That wasn’t his fault,” I protest. “Our mate bond hadn’t settled.”
