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“For now.” Josie showed him where Sandrine and Taryn had stacked extra logs earlier in the day. They were lined up along the wall next to the back door. Mumbling a “thanks,” he knelt and began loading some into the bucket.
Josie leaned a hip against the counter. “It doesn’t bother you? Getting that close to fire?”
Brian stopped and looked up at her. He rubbed a palm over a burn mark on the back of his wrist. It was something she’d seen him do many times that week whenever he talked about the fire that burned down his foster home. “You think I lied about that, too, don’t you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
He stared into the bucket. “But my big trauma is that fire, and here I am loading up the wood-burning stove all day with no issues at all. I guess everything I say or Nicola says now will be subject to doubt.”
“You can’t really blame us,” Josie said. While she had him here, out of earshot of everyone else, during the quiet of the night, was the perfect time to ask him some questions. “Whydidyou lie?”
He shook his head. “I—I don’t know. I don’t have a good explanation. We both wanted to be on the retreat together, but Nicola was afraid she wouldn’t meet the criteria of complex PTSD because what happened didn’t happen to her. She didn’t think losing a sister as a child would qualify her. Listen, I know we shouldn’t have lied. Believe me, I’m sorry. But I couldn’t talk her out of it. I didn’t lie about the fire. It was real. I was there.”
Josie watched him as he arranged the logs in the bucket to make more room. Then he paused to pick a splinter out from under his wedding band. Unlike Nicola’s his was a soft black silicone. “But you had already found a way to be comfortable around fire before you came here.”
“No. I didn’t. I still get, like, triggered. Just not in this kind of situation. These fires are pretty well-contained. I will admit, I was upset when we got here, and I found out the cabins were heated with wood-burning stoves.”
Josie laughed softly. “So was I but for different reasons. I don’t like roughing it.”
He loaded a few more logs into the bucket and then stopped again. “The smell still bothers me sometimes. It’s like I can’t ever really get it out of my nose or something. Sometimes I feel like I can still taste it in the back of my throat. If it’s too strong, I get flashbacks.”
Josie tapped her nose. “That makes sense. Remember what Sandrine said? Our olfactory bulbs are right in front of our brains. Odors go directly to our limbic systems, specifically our amygdala and hippocampus.”
Brian stood up, nodding. His hand kneaded at the scar again. “Yeah, I remember. Emotion and memory. We talked about it in one of my private sessions.”
“Did it help?”
His palm went still. His eyebrows rose a bit, as if his own answer was surprising to him. “Yeah. Actually, it did. We used the flashback halting thing. Remember that? From Monday?”
“Yes, I do.” Josie clasped her hands together, still feeling the ghostly sensation of Mettner’s palm against her skin. “She used it with me but for when my colleague died.”
Brian recited the exercise. “Right now, I’m feeling scared and panicked. In my body, I feel dizzy, sweaty, and a little sick because I’m remembering the fire and at the same time, it’s actually December, twenty-nine years later. I’m here at the Sacred New Beginnings Retreat in Pennsylvania. I can see Josie, a bucket of logs, a sink, that countertop, and that shelf full of coffee mugs, and so I know that the fire isn’t happening now.”
“Wow,” Josie said. “You remember the whole thing.”
He gave a half-hearted smile. “It’s better with a breathing exercise, but yeah. It helped.”
Josie decided to ask the question she’d been wondering all along. “Do you think Sandrine is a fraud?”
Some of the color drained from his face. “Like I said, I’m really sorry about Nic. That we lied—”
Josie held up a hand to silence him. “No judgment from me, Brian. I get why you did it.” In reality, his reasoning for why they had lied made little sense to her, but he didn’t need to know that. “I’m just wondering whether or not you agree with Nicola. Do you think Sandrine is a fraud?”
He reached down and picked up the bucket of logs. “It’s not that I think she’s a fraud. I know she went to school for this stuff. I know she’s got years of experience. It’s just that…I’m not sure she is who she says she is.”
In the quiet, Josie could hear the wind lashing the outside of the house and the steady hum of the generator. She let a few beats of silence settle between them. When Brian offered no explanation, Josie asked, “What does that mean?”
Before Brian could answer, footsteps sounded from behind Josie. “Nic,” he said.
Josie turned around to see Nicola in the doorway, strawberry-blonde hair spiked on one side from her sleeping position. She squinted at them. Immediately, annoyance sent the corners of her small mouth downward. “What are you doing? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Getting some more wood to load up the stove. I didn’t know where it was so Josie showed me.” Brian’s tone sounded almost frightened. He held out the bucket of logs as if in offering.
Nicola’s eyes raked over Josie, steeped in suspicion. Of what, Josie couldn’t fathom. Did she think Josie was coming on to Brian?
Josie pointed to the sink. “I was just getting a glass of water before I go back to sleep.”
Brian brushed past her, leaving her with a look that seemed to say, “Don’t tell Nicola what we were talking about.”
