Page 24 of Undertow

"Oh, wonderful—it looks like Dr. Pirelli's ready for you after all. Shall we head back in?"

Jen led them back inside through a different entrance—bypassing the reception area entirely, Cara noted—and down a corridor lined with abstract watercolors. She stopped outside a door with a brass nameplate. Dr. Phillip Pirelli, Medical Director.

The office was paneled in reclaimed wood and smelled faintly of sandalwood. A wall of diplomas. Tasteful bookshelves — half medical texts, half the kind of hardcovers people displayed to signal depth. A window overlooking the meditation pavilion, the ocean beyond it gray and restless.

The man himself stood to greet them—tall, lean, early fifties, the kind of face that projected competence and calm in equal measure. He came around the desk rather than waiting behind it. Approachable. Peer, not authority. He shook their hands with both of his.

Cara saw the bruise immediately. Right temple. Yellowish green at the edges—three or four days old, maybe more.

"Please, sit." He gestured to two leather chairs angled toward each other rather than toward the desk. Another choice. "Jen tells me you're exploring options for a family member?"

"Our brother," Cara said. "David."

"I'm so sorry you're going through this." He settled into the chair opposite them—not behind the desk, beside them. The geometry of empathy. "Can you tell me a little about what's been happening with David?"

Cara let a breath go—not a sigh, something smaller, the kind of exhale that said this was hard to talk about. "Three DUIs in four years. The first one, our lawyers handled it. The second one was..." She glanced at Reagan. "Harder to handle."

"The third one was in a school zone," Reagan said quietly. "Eleven in the morning."

Pirelli’s expression shifted—practiced concern, but not entirely false. "That must have been terrifying for your family."

"We're past terrified," Cara said. "We're at the part where we're afraid he's going to kill someone."

Pirelli nodded. Slow. The nod of a man who'd sat in this chair across from a hundred families and heard variations of the same story. "That fear is valid. And the fact that you're here—that you're being proactive—tells me a great deal about your family's commitment to David's recovery."

Then he caught her looking at the bruise again.

He smiled. Wry. Self-deprecating. Touched it lightly with two fingers. "Squash racket. Occupational hazard of a man who refuses to accept his backhand isn't what it used to be."

"My ex played squash," Reagan offered. "Came home looking worse than that after league night."

Pirelli laughed—warm, easy, the laugh of a man grateful for a segue away from his own face. "It's a young man's game. I keep telling myself that. I keep not listening."

Cara smiled with him, letting him believe she bought the lie.

Pirelli eased into his professional spiel, using . Treatment timelines. Therapeutic approaches. The importance of family involvement.

They left with brochures, a follow-up call scheduled for the following week, and the exhaustion that came from performing for an hour straight. The January air hit Cara’s face as they stepped outside and she pulled it in—cold, sharp, real. The mask came off in layers. First the smile. Then the posture. Then the voice she’d been holding two registers warmer than her own. Her hands were steady—they were always steady—but her mind was running fast.

She looked back at the facility as it disappeared behind the tree line—all that cedar and glass, all that manufactured quiet. “That place is not what it says on the brochure.”

11

“Well,” Reagan said after three miles of silence. “That was not great.”

Cara couldn’t answer yet. The hospital’s quiet menace was still wrapping around her like ugly gray tendrils of mist, dissolving a little with each mile they put between themselves and the facility. Reagan negotiated a sweeping turn that brought them within view of the little town below the Pacific Crest ground and shot Cara another look. “Where now?”

For a second, her mind blanked. She’d been staring out the passenger window, letting the events at the facility float through her mind. She’d found long ago that letting her thoughts flow—not trying to wrangle a conclusion—led to her best insights.

She sat forward, squinting through the gray gloom. “Anywhere with caffeine. Espresso preferred, but if not, I can deal.”

“I hear that.” Reagan slowed as they entered the main street, nothing more than a narrowed part of the quiet coastal highway. “And I got you, sister.”

She headed her car into a slot in front of an old one-story building with new plate glass windows overlooking the road. The café was called The Driftwood, which was either charmingly on-brand for a coastal town or the result of someone giving up halfway through naming it.

But once inside, Cara quickly realized it had good coffee, a pastry case that Cara evaluated with professional skepticism, and windows overlooking a two-block main street where nothing appeared to be happening. Which was, after the last two hours, exactly what she needed.

Reagan wrapped her hands around a latte and stared at the foam. “So. That place.”