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“Yeah.” I swallowed hard. I knew he couldn’t say a word to Mom but that nagging and irrational worry that he would was ever-present. I couldn’t let her find out I’d tried again. It’d break her heart.
The silence was agonizing, chipping away at my patience. My leg bounced quickly, and I shifted repeatedly in my chair.
“Are you feeling all right?” David asked as he set down his pen. He watched me carefully.
“I just want to go,” I admitted. “I hate these appointments. They feel pointless.”
“Why?”
“It’s always the same. Is your medication okay? How are you feeling? Are you taking it? Same fucking bullshit.”
“I imagine,” David began, closing the file to give me his full attention. Fuck me. “I imagine most appointments are mundane. I get that. However, I think this one warrants more than a handful of quick one or two-word answers before you leave.”
“How do you figure?” I frowned.
“Let’s just call the last few weeks… stressful,” he said. “Two weeks traveling with the packs, a lot of drinking and temptation to drink, reuniting with your estranged wife, reuniting with your mom and your brothers, moving back in with your mom, taking your place in the pack, dealing with your father-in-law, handling—or not handling—the accusations that led to you leaving town—”
“You have no fucking clue why I left town,” I snapped. Jesus fucking Christ, he wasn’t holding any punches.
“Look, Killian, you’re dealing with a lot more than the average person ever deals with,” David continued as if I wasn’t a grumpy asshole. “It’s natural to feel the stress of that.”
“I’m fine,” I shot back.
“Does your mom know about your diagnosis? Your brothers?”
“No. And it’ll stay that way.”
“Killian, what support network do you have?” he asked, and I faltered. Support network? I didn’t fucking need one. I had a doctor. I was good to go. “I can only assume from your resounding silence that you don’t have one.”
Fucking jackass.
“Did you know your grandmother was bipolar?” David said, and I frowned. “Maeve’s mother, not Seamus’s.”
Well, fuck. Mom didn’t talk about her mom. At all. Ever. We knew enough to know that her mother had left her on a friend’s porch in the middle of the night with a backpack, a note, and a kitchen timer so her mother could get away without confrontation. Beyond that, Mom never talked about her family. Not that I fucking blamed her.
Now this? This was more reason for her not to know about my diagnosis.
“No,” I replied. “I didn’t know.”
“You should tell her. She’d understand your struggle,” he continued. Or she’d fucking hate me and want nothing to do with me. Unlikely but the thought stuck in the back of my mind because what if she did?
“I don’t want to talk to her about this,” I reiterated. I shifted in the chair again. Who the fuck kept a chair that felt like it was made of rocks? “It’s not her problem. It’s mine.”
“You’re on edge.”
No fucking shit. I hadn’t planned to deal with so much crap. Rationally, I could convince myself I understood why he was being so thorough. But I was irritated. Annoyed. The last Fall Games event was today, the packs were all together, and there was shit to be done. And all that was before the sour taste the town’s newcomer, Sadie, had left in my mouth.
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t expecting the third degree,” I scoffed. “I figured I’d get my medication and go.”
“How is your medication working?” he asked instead of indulging my frustration.
“Seems fine.”
“Seems fine?” he repeated. “What does that mean?”
“It means it seems fine,” I said once more.
“How have your moods been?”
