Page 1 of No Asylum Here

Chapter One

Tuesday

"Dr. Beckett, do you know why I called you into my office?”

I shook my head, barely registering the psychiatrist’s question. My attention was glued to the woman standing in the corner of Dr. Robert Braith’s office. Her skin was paper white, her wrists wrapped in bloody gauze. She gaped at me with an expression that had my stomach twisting into knots.

“Tuesday? Are you listening?”

Hearing my first name had my gaze snapping back to the gray-haired man behind the desk. His glasses were perched halfway down his nose, and he angled his head to glare at me over their tortoiseshell rims.

“I–I’m sorry, Dr. Braith. My mind is elsewhere.”

“That’s the problem. Your mind has been elsewhere for months.” Braith was a stout fellow, the vest beneath his lab coat straining over his portly belly, buttons threatening to pop with the slightest movement. He was also a respected psychiatrist with years of tenure. I’d been so excited to land a mentorship with him fresh out of my psychiatric residency. And I was blowing it.

“I’m just tired,” I lied.

Leaning back in his chair, he took his glasses off, folded them, and placed them on his desk with a sigh. “It’s more than that, and you know it, Dr. Beckett. As I was saying, this position isn’t a good fit for you anymore.”

My heart bottomed out. “Wait, are you…?”

“Letting you go? Yes, I’m afraid so. As of today, you no longer work for Braith Psychiatry.”

My head whirled as it tried to parse that I was being fired. “But I⁠—”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said with a curt tone that told me there was no changing his mind. “You’re to clean out your office, then a member of our security will escort you to your vehicle.”

My breathing turned short and sharp as panic set in.

This isn’t happening.

My eyes swung back to the corner of the room, where the young woman stood. The bandages on her wrists were swollen with blood, long overdue for a change.

“This is about Lauren Hawkins, isn’t it?” I swallowed, jerking with a shiver. Speaking her name, no matter how many times she came up in conversation or in insurance paperwork, had my stomach roiling with guilt.

Dr. Braith visibly tensed. “That’s a complicated question.”

I dug my nails into my thighs, the sting momentarily distracting me from the woman whose eyes watched me with an unblinking intensity. “It’s a yes or no, Doctor. I think that’s pretty damn simple.”

Braith’s eyes narrowed as his face turned pink. He had the ego you’d expect from a middle-aged white man with framed degrees mounted on his wall over the bookcase containing the dozen or so books on psychology he’d authored. “Death is inevitable, Dr. Beckett. As physicians, we do our best to delay it. That’s all we can do. In the case of Ms. Hawkins, she was beyond our help…”

I braced for the but.

“But the loss of your patient has driven you to madness, it seems.”

Madness. Ha.

My attention briefly flicked back to the woman.

Understatement of the fucking century, that.

“You need to get yourself help first before you can be trusted to provide sound help to others.”

I hated how right he was. I’d been out of it for weeks. I was hardly eating and had dropped a lot of weight in too short a period. I was zoning out during patient sessions. And now, the hallucinations…

It was silly, arguing with him when I knew I had this coming. Deserved it, even. I was a liability to his practice, to the patients. Frankly, it was a miracle his malpractice insurance rates hadn’t gone up since Lauren’s family lawsuit.

But I didn’t want to lose this job. Not when it had taken everything I had to get here. “If you give me another chance, I’ll get my shit straightened out, I promise⁠—”