Page 23 of Into Pitch

I’ve been coming here long enough now that the room doesn’t feel entirely like a trap. More like a place that I can breathe without immediately looking for exits.

It took six weeks to get to this point, but we’re here now.

Six weeks of showing up, sitting down, and answering the safer questions. Work. Sleep. Habits. Coping. The kind of stuff you can talk about without scraping open anything that bleeds.

That apparently ends today, because I can feel it in the air before Dr. Dormsworth even speaks.

He sits across from me in his chair, calm as always, posture loose like he’s got all the time in the world. He doesn’t look like he’s bracing himself for a fight, which is exactly what irritates me. He instead flips his notebook closed, just a quiet little shift that tells me he’s done collecting baseline data like I’m a lab rat.

His icy blue eyes finally lift to mine, steady and unblinking.

“Tell me about your mother.”

Ugh, there it is.

I stare back at him, waiting for my body to do what it usually does when someone goes near the subject. Tense and deflect. Maybe even joke and shut down. All the well-worn survival tricks, but I’m on this couch for a reason.

My fingers drift to the edge of my sleeve without thinking, brushing against the bracelet beneath it. I press my thumb into the charm until the metal bites painfully and pulls me into the present to keep me here.

“What about my mother?” I counter dryly.

“What she did and didn’t do.” His reply even.

I let out a short laugh. “That’s a big question.”

“It is,” he agrees. “Start small. Just one memory and we will go from there.”

My mouth opens and nothing comes out. Because if I start, I don’t get to choose where it goes. That’s memories. They aren’t polite nor do they arrive in order. And they certainly don’t stop when you ask them to. They’ll drown you in them until you suffocate and lose yourself beneath the surface.

“I don’t know. She was just… there. Sometimes.” I murmur finally, shifting on the couch. It squeaks beneath me and sounds a lot louder in this space than it normally does.

He doesn’t let those words skate past him. “Sometimes?”

“She worked when she felt like it. She got clean sometimes. She tried—”

“Sadie,” he interrupts gently, not harsh but not letting me hide in vague either. “You’re describing pattern. Not a relationship.”

My jaw clenches as I glare back at him, but he waits. He lets the silence stretch, and I realize he isn’t going to rescue me from it. He’s going to let it do its job.

“She wasn’t maternal,” I mutter and drop my hands into my lap. “Not in the ways people mean when they say that.”

“What ways?” He probes.

“The consistent ways. The normal ones. Packing lunches. Asking about school. Knowing what my favorite color was. Not leaving me alone for hours so she could disappear into a bedroom with some guy whose name I didn’t know.” I list plainly. Not sure how else to do it.

Dr. Dormsworth’s expression doesn’t change. There’s no shock or pity, just blatant attention.

“How old were you?” He asks.

“It didn’t matter,” I snap automatically. Not sure why I felt defensive of that.

His gaze remains on me, patient. “It clearly mattered to you.”

“I don’t know. Six? Seven? Eight? It was always happening. It didn’t just start, it just existed.” I mutter.

“Okay,” he murmurs, like he’s marking it down somewhere inside his head. “When you say she disappeared into the bedroom, what did you do?”

The question pries at something. Not the obvious horror, not the big trauma later, but the quiet rot of being a child and realizing you aren’t the priority.