Page 70 of The Diamond in the Rough

Marta and Hallie had been standing and chatting on the other side of the room with the half-dozen people in the group who hadn’t been at Tranquil Brook, and when Dr. Nayak spoke, they came over and joined the circle of chairs where the rest of them were already sitting.

“Let’s begin with some deep breathing,” Dr. Nayak said, her voice low and gentle. Deliberately monotone so that it would be soothing. She closed her eyes, one arm holding her damp black bear, the other gripping the white paw of Rayn’s.

Exhale.

Inhale.

“Imagine yourself in a safe place,” Dr. Nayak murmured. “A place where you feel secure. Protected. A place where you are in control of yourself and everything around you.”

She wasn’t sure that such a place existed.

Beside her, Rayn’s hand squeezed over hers on the bear. A reminder she wasn’t alone.

That she was safe here, at least.

But she definitely didn’t want to imagine this room, even ifthere were some people in it who did make her feel safe. Well, safe-er. Nowhere felt actually safe.

“Remember,” Dr. Nayak’s voice interrupted her worrying. “That your magic is yours, and no one else’s. That your feelings are yours, and no one else’s. Only you can let either magic or emotions get out of control.”

She suppressed a sigh. Dr. Nayak said that every time, and yet she lost control of her magic weekly. Maybe she just didn’t want to control it enough…

I pushedmyself out of the memory, scrubbing at tears that had begun to track their way down my cheeks, my heart aching for Melissa. I wondered if she still felt that way—like it was her fault that her magic was sometimes erratic.

From what Mason had taught me, while it was true that emotions and magic were linked, when you were learning, it was very, very hard to control your magic, especially when your emotions were high.

I blinked.

For all that Mason had spent a lot of time talking about control to Jackson and me, he’d never once suggested thatemotionsneeded to be controlled. Only that we should shift the spillover away from potentially destructive magic.

And then I frowned down at the bear.

I’d entered into Melissa’s memories of my own will.

And then I’d come back out when I got annoyed with the memory.

By myself.

No one had interrupted me. Nothing horrible in the memory had given me a jolt of adrenaline or disgust or fear—the things that usually pushed me back out of them.

I’d just… decided I’d seen enough.

Huh.

I reached out for the bear’s paw again.

“It’s best,”Dr. Nayak was saying. “To think of your magic and your Arcane abilities as something to compartmentalize. Something you can shut off or lock away so that you can function in the world.”

Just to seeif I could, I pushed the thought away—and it went.

I frowned again.

I didn’t remember Dr. Nayak saying things that I disagreed with—and I did disagree with her. Now, at least. Maybe that was four-years-later me, and at the time I’d just desperately wanted any sort of guidance, any sort of solution to the storm of thoughts and emotions that flooded me and threatened my precarious balance and control from moment to moment.

Because now I knew differently.

Ward didn’t shut off or lock away his abilities. He worked with them, navigating around them as he wanted or needed to. Mason was the same. Deliberate, controlled, but neither one of them shut their abilities off.

So maybe the problem was that Ihadshut mine off. Maybe instead of trying to push mine away, I needed to just let them happen.