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Talking about Mett lightened the weight of her grief. Normally she couldn’t bear to burden others with it. But here was Sandrine, offering a space for Mettner and Josie’s memories of him. Josie waved her hands, indicating the rest of the room. “Mett would love this place. I mean, he would have loved it. He was an avid hunter and fisher. He had three brothers. They grew up doing outdoorsy stuff. He would probably laugh if he knew I was here, in a place like this, to talk about him. He was in love. Deeply in love. Her name is Amber. God, if he could see her now, the way she suffers, it would break his heart.” She wiped a tear from her cheek and clasped her palms together, feeling the ghost of his hand in hers from the night he’d died. “He, uh, loved the job and he was good at it. He was hard-working. Very serious. He, uh, challenged me all the time. It always annoyed Noah—that’s my husband, he’s part of our investigative team, too—but I liked it.”
Sandrine’s gentle smile deepened with each fact that Josie shared. “Why? Why did you like it?”
Josie rested her elbows on her knees. Now the twelve-pointer seemed to look down on her with approval. “Because he made me better. Better at my job. Better at…being a human.”
Josie waited for Sandrine to ask if she thought she needed to be a better human. Her regular therapist, Dr. Rosetti, would have pounced on that. Instead, she said, “Why do you think your body has responded to his death by keeping you from restful sleep?”
Josie looked again at the twelve-pointer. It had no answer. “I don’t know.”
Softly, Sandrine said, “You’ve lost people before, by violence.”
“Yes.” Josie squeezed her hands together until the skin blanched. “My first husband, Ray, and my grandmother. Both were shot. Like Mett. I couldn’t save them.”
“But you were there,” Sandrine said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Josie, I am so sorry. That is so much for one person to carry.”
“Wait till you hear about my childhood.”
THREE
The joke fell flat. Sandrine continued to stare at her. Josie searched her face for pity but found only compassion. The last of the tension in her shoulders melted away.
Sandrine said, “Hypervigilance is extremely common in complex PTSD cases. Your brain and your body are constantly on high alert, trying to be ready in case something else traumatic occurs, so that it can protect you.”
“But it can’t protect me,” Josie blurted. “Nothing can protect any of us from traumatic things happening. We can be careful. Avoid certain situations, try to prepare for any eventuality, and still get blindsided by something absolutely horrifying.”
She thought about the news she had received only a few days before leaving for the retreat. The terrible truth that had caused the rift between her and Noah. Did it count as trauma? She had certainly felt blindsided. It was definitely terrible. She’d been getting less sleep than ever.
“You’re right,” said Sandrine. “It’s a very difficult truth to live with, isn’t it?”
Josie touched a hand to her chest where her heart now pounded. “You can’t fix me in a week.”
Sandrine smiled again. “I know. I’m not trying to ‘fix’ you, Josie. What I would like to do is offer you—all of you—some tools that might be helpful to you in dealing with your PTSD. Things you can take with you when you leave here, or techniques you can work on at home with your own therapist. Hopefully, you’ll find something valuable. Sometimes just getting out of our usual environment can be helpful as well, even if we’re roughing it.”
Josie’s heartbeat slowed marginally. She respected Sandrine’s honesty. Her hand moved from her chest to the thin scar that ran from just beneath her ear, down the side of her face, terminating at the center of her chin. A relic from her childhood. One of the first acts in the shitshow of her life. She had always prided herself on being so much stronger than the traumatized little girl who had endured so much, but here she was, an adult who routinely took down criminals, and she couldn’t sleep through the night to save her life.
“Often our bodies react far more quickly than our minds when it comes to processing trauma,” Sandrine added. “For you, especially in a job where you have to compartmentalize on a regular basis just in order to get through a shift, I’d like to start by trying to get you more in touch with your body. Has your therapist ever recommended a body scan?”
Josie could not stop her eye-roll.
Sandrine laughed again. “Not a fan?”
Josie felt her face flush. “Sorry. My therapist has tried this with me. Many times. It doesn’t work. She thinks I have a ‘negative attitude’ about it—which is probably true—but I just don’t understand how knowing where my body feels the most crappy is supposed to help me get past all this trauma.”
“That’s fair,” Sandrine said.
Josie looked to the twelve-pointer. Silently, she asked him,Can you believe this lady?
Dr. Rosetti had proselytized endlessly about the benefits of body scans. She could not and would not force Josie to avail herself of the practice but the way she made it sound, a body scan was like some miraculous cure for every emotional wound. All it did for Josie was make her feel more uncomfortable.
Sandrine went on, “Josie, when you are fairly relaxed, let’s say at home having dinner with your husband, and when you are in a high-stress situation, maybe working on a difficult case at the department, do you feel any differently? Or are those two things more or less the same to you, emotionally?”
Josie took a moment to think this over. With dawning horror, she realized that aside from the physical exhaustion that came with a high-stakes case, her emotional state was pretty much always the same. She was calm. Steady. Steely. Rarely did she break down. She was all those things no matter what was happening. This had always seemed like a good thing. “Are you saying that I can’t tell the difference between what feels stressful and what feels relaxing?”
The twelve-pointer’s glassy eyes looked sad.
