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Reese turns to Elaine. “Isn’t it possible you relived your past trauma so intensely—in such a real way to you—that under influence of multiple drugs, you projected that unforgivable abuse into the present. And onto Dr. Danvers?”
“No,” Elaine mutters without making eye contact with her.
Reese catches Simon’s eye, and he can tell that she’s longing to treat Elaine like a hostile witness. He watches Liisa, expecting the psychologist to weigh in with some kind of wisdom, but she remains as silent and impassive as she has been for the rest of the intervention.
“What if you’re wrong, Elaine?” Baljit demands.
JJ nods solemnly. “When this comes to light, our group won’t survive. It just won’t.”
“And it might set all of us back,” Reese adds. “Back to that dark place where our addictions controlled us. You’re an advocate, right? You care about the sobriety of addicts?”
Elaine won’t even look at Reese anymore.
Simon’s hip aches and his stomach turns. “I’m too old for this shit,” he mumbles to himself. Louder, he says, “Don’t be so fucking selfish, Elaine.”
She looks around the room at each of them, her gaze unwavering, and then she rises to her feet. “Thank you all for coming. But there’s no point in discussing it anymore.”
CHAPTER 12
Monday, April 8
Holly sits behind her white concrete desk, a minimalist rectangle without drawers that the clinic’s designer badgered her into ordering. She has yet to hear back from Aaron’s attorney. Bracing for the worst, she googles her own name again and, after finding no new links, rechecks her social media. Still nothing. She’s amazed it hasn’t all blown up since she left Elaine’s place on Friday. Holly read somewhere that social media posts get more attention on Mondays. She wonders if Elaine deliberately waited for the weekend to pass to target a wider audience.
Patients with terminal illnesses report how the time spent waiting for the diagnosis to be confirmed—the biopsy to come back or the scan to be interpreted—can be the most unnerving period, worse even than the certainty of a medical death sentence. Waiting now for Elaine’s accusations to go viral is Holly’s closest comparable experience, and yet she is remarkably calm. Ever since she vaped DMT in her grandfather’s solarium, she has felt almost detached. As if the potential career-ending fallout from Elaine’s allegations will affect someone other than herself. As if the price she will pay for being a pioneer of psychedelic therapy will be worth the cost if her patients are freed of their addictions. As a psychiatrist, she’s impressed by the grounding power of DMT. And, as a diehard psychedelic therapy advocate, she feels vindicated.
But Holly hasn’t been able to shake the thoughts of the fatal crash since she saw her dad again in her visions after vaping DMT. It reminds her of Peru. Despite the profound healing power of that ayahuasca retreat, Holly had forgotten the main downside of those visions: the niggling sense of incompleteness. She could sense essential details from the car accident lying just below the surface of her consciousness but refusing to bubble up to it. The frustration of not remembering has returned now like an itch she can’t quite reach.
Holly glances down at her open handbag and sees the tip of the vape pen, which her grandfather insisted she take home with her, poking out of the inner pouch. She resists the temptation to take a few puffs now to see if she can conjure her father again. To fill in that vital memory gap.
A light knock at the partially open door pulls Holly from those thoughts. She gently nudges her bag closed with the toe of her shoe. Tanya, her sweet but overwhelmed office assistant, opens the door wider.
“That, uh, reporter called again,” Tanya says, bobbing from foot to foot.
Holly nods. She doesn’t need to ask her assistant which reporter. It could only be Katy Armstrong, who writes for the Orange County Register.
After Simon went public, admitting to his battles with addiction and glorifying Holly’s therapy, she was inundated with media requests. She did a handful of select interviews, from the New York Times to NBC. She only agreed to speak to Katy because she represented the most-read local newspaper.
Holly can still picture their conversation, which they held in this office.
Petite, with black hair tied in a tight ponytail and wearing throwback, round wire glasses, Katy looked innocuous enough. But from the moment Holly sat down across from her, she could tell by the young reporter’s body language—elbows dug into the armrest, back arched, and shoulders tilted forward as if ready to pounce—that this interview would be different from the others.
After a couple of softball questions, Katy launched right into it. “At the end of the day, Dr. Danvers, aren’t you basically replacing one addiction for another?”
Holly shook her head. “Psychedelics don’t work that way. They’re not addicting in the traditional sense.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“Most psychedelics, like ketamine, activate serotonin receptors inside the brain. They reduce the energy needed to switch between different activity states and help reprogram the pathways. We call it neuroplasticity. In other words, they stimulate regions of the brain that aren’t normally active. And those effects last long after the drug wears off. Unlike other medications, antidepressants for example, we don’t keep clients on psychedelics indefinitely.”
Katy leaned farther forward, her eyes probing. “Just how long do you keep your patients on them?”
“Depends on the indication. But in general, it’s one treatment with ketamine per week for three to six months.”
“And in that time, patients come to your office every week to get high?”
“No,” Holly said, focusing on her breathing, refusing to let herself be provoked. “Once a week, they come in for administration of ketamine under carefully monitored and controlled conditions. Those are followed by two more sessions—in one-on-one and group settings—to debrief and cognitively deconstruct the experience.”
“And this method of yours cured Simon Lowry?”
