The fear doesn't fit. It has no place in everything I've built. For seven years, I've been afraid of nothing because there's nothing they can do to me that hasn't already been done.
But I'm afraid of this.
Afraid of her walking out that door and never walking back through it. Afraid of the chemicals dragging me under before I can see her face again. Afraid that she knows too much now, and the building is full of people who will punish us both for it.
My gut is cold with fear.
Chapter 16
Hope
The ethics textbook is open on my kitchen table, spine cracked from too many readings.
I bought it five years ago for a graduate seminar I barely remember. Kept it because the professor wrote in the margins during office hours—red ink observations that felt important at the time. Now the pages are soft with handling and the coffee rings on the cover have faded to brown.
Chapter 14: Boundaries in Institutional Settings.
I've read this chapter four times since Tuesday. Not for work. For me.
The language is clinical, careful.Dual relationships.Power differentials.Transference and countertransference.Every paragraph describes the thing I'm supposed to be afraid of, the ethical lines I've been trained to see.
I turn to the section on self-assessment. The questions are meant to catch you before you fall.
Do you find yourself thinking about the client outside of professional contexts?
Yes.
Do you look forward to sessions in ways that extend beyond professional satisfaction?
Yes.
Have you engaged in physical contact not required by your role?
I close my eyes and feel his fingers inside me. Feel my body clenching around them while I pretended to read a checklist.
Yes.
The textbook expects these questions to produce shame. Name the transgression, trigger the alarm and the alarm makes you stop.
But there's no alarm.
I set my coffee down and stare at the page until the words blur. This is the part I've been circling for days—the honest audit I've been avoiding because I already know what I'll find.
The accident was seven years ago. Front-impact collision, traumatic brain injury, partial damage to my amygdala. I understood the diagnosis when they gave it to me. Understood it again in the rehabilitation sessions, the follow-up appointments, the concerned looks from specialists who wanted to make sure I grasped what had changed.
Your threat detection may be impaired. Your social norm processing may be affected. You may not experience fear responses in situations where fear would be appropriate.
I understood. I just stopped thinking about it.
You can't miss what you can't feel. That's what I told myself, and it held up well enough to live by. I walked into Greenridgeon my first day and felt fine. Walked past maximum security patients and felt fine. Sat across from a man convicted of eighteen murders and feltinterested, not afraid.
Everyone else burned out or requested transfers. I stayed because staying felt normal.
But this—Jude, what we're doing, what I want to keep doing—this isn't about threat detection. I'm not failing to notice danger. I'm failing to feel the shame that's supposed to stop me.
The textbook assumes shame is automatic. Cross a line, feel bad, correct course. The whole ethical framework depends on it—the constant pull toward acceptable behavior that you never have to think about, that just works.
Mine doesn't work.
