Page 66 of Pretty Nightmare

“OK, then. But we should do it in my office.” She stands up and smiles wide at me, then extends her hand. “Are you up for a hike?”

A hike. You gotta fucking love her. And I do.

So I take her hand and let her take me on a hike.

PRESENT DAY

The first thing I did when I decided to leave my partnership in LA and move back to Old Home after Indie returned from her four-year hiatus was to rent an office space in Pearl Springs. It’s on the second floor over the printing shop on Main Street. Close enough that I could come here regularly, but still have the privacy I was used to.

I’m not hiding anything from Adam and McKay. If they wanted my secrets, they would have them. But so far, neither of them has taken much interest in my frequent trips into Pearl Springs.

The office is large—much larger than I need—and smells like old books. Not the good kind of old books, either, if that is even a thing, but the musty, moldy smell of ink and paper that’s been hoarded over decades.

But it’s only seven hundred dollars a month and that includes utilities and internet, so… fuck it.

There are seven rooms up here. Three of them feel more like large closets than the private offices they might’ve been at some point. One is a bathroom with a shower. Handy. One is an open space that was probably a reception area. And then there are two larger offices. The partners worked there, I suppose. This used to be a law firm.

But I only use the main reception area and one of the large closets. I pulled up the old carpet and refinished the floors before I moved in, then added some haughty leather couches with nail-head trim and a matching set of wingback chairs by the long wall of windows.

I sometimes sleep here. I like this place even though it’s not that private. The walls are thin—I can hear everyone downstairs in the print shop—but they close at four-thirty Monday through Friday, and I mostly work here in the evenings. So it’s fine.

But the main reason I need this space is so I can continue my sessions.

I spent three days with Ana up in Wyoming during my first visit four years ago. The ‘office’ she took me to that first day was a small ledge at the top of a nearby plateau with views of a river valley down below and her healing center off to the west.

I lost my breath up there, it was that beautiful.

Her healing center though… it’s huge. Everything I had imagined it would be on the drive up and then discarded when I saw the small cabin.

I wanted to resent it. And I had a few thoughts about her being a sellout. But I am the last person to judge anyone who sells out.

Anyway, it’s a very nice place. Has a very spa-like feel to it.

We didn’t do the session on the plateau. We just sat there in silence for a little while. I’m the kind of man who is comfortable in silence. I’ve been alone my whole life.

Well, most of it. Anyway. Carter was there in the beginning.

Wasn’t he?

This is part of my problem. I remember having a brother. A twin brother. He was there. But memories are unreliable. This is what Ana and I talked about once the initial silence was over.

Memories. The memory. It was mostly an academic conversation about anatomy that called up—ironically—memories of med school.

But the take-home message we both agreed on was that it’s all very unreliable.

Not comforting, but what can you do?

We didn’t do our session until the morning of the third day. And by that time, she had talked me down from the idea that I could do this all myself and I let her hypnotize me with a specific set of questions.

They were not the questions I needed answers to. The baseline, as it’s called. This was her idea and it made sense scientifically. She needed to get a general starting point. But we recorded it. That was the important part. This is how I learned her technique for putting someone under. My own technique was severely lacking, I was not too proud to admit after I saw how she did it. And I felt so bad for how I had mishandled Indie all these years that I nearly fell into a crushing depression when I got back to LA.

Nearly? That’s a lie. I took two months off and pretty much started talking to myself. It wasn’t the rambling of an insane man. It was more… functional. List-making. Talking things through. Planning. But it wasn’t how I had planned on returning home.

McKay called a few more times, mostly asking about Indie. Filling me in on his attempts to find her. I never heard from Adam at all.

I was never important enough for Adam to call me. If it didn’t involve Indie making a catastrophic mistake, he couldn’t be bothered with me.

Eventually I went on to finish my residency and then I started formulating my plan to tackle my memory issues. And specifically why I cannot recall a clear reason for taking such an interest in Indie.