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Of course, I’d stopped.
I didn’twantto die, even though it would make my family’s life so much easier.
Three weeks sober and counting. It wasn’t easy. Not after years of creating habits that revolved around my next mental escape, but I was managing. It didn’t hurt that my sister had found the best phycologist in town to fit me into her overcrowded schedule, and as long as I met the expectations of my family—which included random alcohol and drug tests, among other things—they wouldn’t force me into a rehabilitation clinic.
Not that they could technicallyforceme, but I didn’t need an intervention.
I needed a fucking miracle if I was expected to get my life together.
One step at a time.
“You mentioned last week that even though you and your sister are on better terms, you still have a hard time trusting her?”
I swallowed the knot in my throat.
“It’s not just her,” I admitted, shifting in my seat to fiddle with the end of my dress. It was one of those beautiful November days in South Carolina that felt more like spring than fall. Tonight, the temps would drop, but for now I was basking in it.
“Who else?”
“My entire family, really,” I said, forcing myself to be honest.
Dr. Casson told me during my first session there would be no point in lying to her—she had a talent for sniffing them out. She’d further said that being honest was the only way she could help me heal, help me do better.
And I really, really wanted to do better.
I didn’t like being a mess. It wasn’t like I thrived in the misery of a string of failed marriages that were more impulsive than one-clicking an online sale or the countless times I’d picked the wrong man and ended up on the wrong side of his hand.
It wasn’t like I enjoyed hurting my family, hurting my sister…
“You look so much like her tonight,” he said, backing me into a corner. “If I ask really nice, will you let me call you by her name?”
A wave of nausea crashed in my stomach, and I tried to breathe around it.
“What is it about them that makes them hard to trust?” she asked.
“I suppose you could trace it back to how we were raised. Being a VanDoren isn’t as easy as it likely seems to the public. Mistakes aren’t tolerated and if youdidmake them…if you ran into a situation where you needed help, you were better off pretending it never happened.”
Dr. Casson nodded while she twirled her pen in her hand. “So you felt like you couldn’t go to them for help.”
I nodded.
“And now?”
“Now…” I blew out a breath. “Persephone and I are getting reacquainted as sisters.” The notion brought a soft smile to my lips.
I loved my sister, but our past…well,mypast was complicated. She was oblivious to the source of indifference that had festered between us for far too long. And yes, that was my fault. I never talked to her about what happened, never really dealt with what happened, instead choosing to try and drink the memory away or outrun it.
But I was here now. Trying.
“Is there anyone besides your sister that you’re reconnecting with? Any member of your family that makes you feel safe enough to trust them? Talk to them openly?”
“No,” I admitted. “I want to reach that place at some point with my parents, but they’ve never really understood me.”
“Can you elaborate on that a bit?”
I folded my hands in my lap to keep from gripping the armrest of the chair. “We’re only eighteen months apart,” I explained. “My sister and me. I don’t remember a time when my baby sister wasn’t the most important thing in the world to me. To my entire family, really. Growing up, everything came so effortlessly to her. She was elegant and poised in diapers, or so my mother tells me. But me? I was the tough one. The complicated one. Too emotional. Too impulsive. Too combative.” I shook my head. “Some of my earliest memories are of my parents begging me not to make a scene at some charity event while at the same time praising Persephone for being so delightfully quiet and polite. One of the times I remember was when I was seven. I hadn’t made a scene, I’d just asked when the food would be served.”
Tears pricked the back of my eyes, but I tipped my chin and forced them down. “I’m not saying instances like those excuse my recent behavior,” I hurried to add. “But you can only be told you’re the problem child so many times before you decide to live up to title.”
