Page 41 of Letters From A Stalker

I say goodbye. At least I think I do.

Then I walk toward the clinic doors with Kai Blackwood’s attention following me all the way out.

8

Kai

The heavy office door closes behind Julia with a muted thud. I remain standing in the doorway of my office long after there is any reason for me to be there. Usually, this is the easiest part of the rhythm. When a patient leaves, I give myself a minute, sometimes two, to separate whatever they carried into the room from whatever the next person is about to bring. Then I go back inside, finish my notes, reset, and move on.

Today, for some reason, my feet don't move. All I can see is Julia standing in front of me a few minutes ago with her purse hanging from one shoulder, her eyes technically focused on my face while some part of her remained so far away that I could feel the distance between us. Physically, she knew where she was. She was aware of what day it was. She wanted to go home. She answered every orientation question I asked her, which should’ve been enough to settle the trained part of my brain and recognise when a patient is safe to leave. Only I knew better. Mentally, she was somewhere else. And that place was not safe.

“You planning on standing there until tomorrow?” Mara's voice pulls my attention away from the closed door.

I turn toward her. Her eyes are fixed on me with the same expression she has worn every time she's caught something I would've preferred to keep to myself over the last six years.

“What?”

Her brow lifts. “You tell me.”

“Nothing to tell.”

The answer earns me a look.

I exhale and drag a hand over my jaw. “Nothing happened that isn't part of trauma work.”

“Pretty sure that's what we do here, Kai.”

I give her a look. “I know what we do here.”

“Then why do you look like you want to punch a hole in the wall with your fist?”

I stare at her as words start forming in my head. Because a twelve-year-old girl stood barefoot in a pantry while her mother showed her fucking cum on her father's underwear. Because she was taught to know how her father's tennis clothes were supposed to smell. Because she was forced to listen to an adult fall apart before she was old enough to understand why the adult shouldn't have been falling apart “on her”. Because she looked at me with half the fucking light gone from her eyes and still tried to convince me she was fine.

But I don't say any of that.

“We went deeper than I expected,” I told Mara instead. “I misread where her tolerance was.”

Mara's expression grows a shade more worried. “She dissociated?”

“Yes.”

“Badly?”

“Enough.” The single word comes out harder than I intended.

There hadn't been a clear warning. That's the part I can't stop turning over. Julia spent most of the session engaged. She was insightful enough to recognize several of her own patterns before I needed to point them out. She was stubborn enough to argue when she thought I was wrong. We talked about her father last week without anything approaching the reaction I saw today, and nothing in her intake suggested that asking about her mother would be the thing that pulled the floor out from underneath her.

Her father was supposed to be the obvious wound. But it was her mother that had been living inside it and I hadn't seen that until Julia started talking.

Mara studies me for another second. “She’s okay to drive?”

“She was oriented when she left.”

“That wasn't what I asked.”

I give her a look, but Mara knows better than to push when my expression changes. Unfortunately, she also knows me well enough not to care.

“I asked her to stay longer,” I say. “She wouldn't.”