Page 150 of Letters From A Stalker

“Not like that. Jesus. I don’t mean Julia reminds me of my mother. I mean the look on her face did.”

Understanding replaces the confusion. I turn back toward the window.

“My mother used to disappear without going anywhere. She could cook dinner, wash dishes, answer me if I asked her something, but there were nights after he’d been at her where she wasn’t really in the room anymore. I knew that look years before I knew what dissociation was.” My throat tightens around the memory. “And she was always fine. Bruises under her sleeves, split lip, staring through the wall like there was something better on the other side of it, and if anybody asked, she was fine. People believed her because believing her meant they didn’t have to do anything. Eventually most of them stopped asking.”

Mara watches me quietly.

“Julia walked out of this office looking exactly like that and told me she was fine.”

“So you followed her.”

“Yes.” The word tastes like shit.

“I told myself I was making sure she got home safely. At the time, part of me probably believed it.” I lean forward again, looking at my hands because I don’t deserve the relief of looking anywhere else. “Then she got home. She was safe. That should have been the end of it.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“No.”

What followed sounds worse when reduced to facts, which is probably appropriate. I stayed. I returned. I watched her. I wrote to her. I let myself become somebody she chose without telling her that she had never been given all the information necessary to make that choice.

“The first time it was concern,” I say. “Everything after that was me finding better excuses for something I wanted.”

Mara is silent for a while before asking, “Why her?”

A humorless breath leaves me. “You’ve spent the last six years blocking women from the office line. You tell me.”

“Exactly my point. You have never had a shortage of women willing to sleep with you, Kai. I have blocked enough numbers from women trying to turn psychiatric scheduling into Tinder to prove that.” Her mouth tightens. “So why risk your license, your practice and apparently this woman’s trust when you could have gone home with practically anybody else?”

“Because I didn’t want anybody else.” The answer spills out of me without thinking because it’s the absolute truth. From the moment I laid eyes on her… it was her.

Mara absorbs it. I hate how pathetic it sounds.

“I wanted her,” I continue, quieter now. “Not when she first came to me in that state, obviously. But right after I followed her that first night. I was worried about her, and then I saw things I had no right to see and I should have fucking left. Instead, I went back. The letters came after that, and every line I crossed made the next one easier to explain to myself.”

“And then she wanted Ghost.”

My jaw tightens. “Yes.”

I remember the lamp glowing in her window, the door she left open, her voice saying Ghost beneath me. The way she slept tucked against my chest. Every memory that felt like something precious yesterday now has another version underneath it, one where Julia didn’t know the man touching her had already sat across from her while she described the worst moments of her life.

“She trusted him,” I say, and my voice sounds rough even to me. “She trusted me too, just for completely different reasons, and I let her believe those trusts belonged to two different men.”

Mara’s gaze drops briefly. “That’s the part you’re stuck on.”

“It’s the part that matters.”

Not the disciplinary hearing that will almost certainly follow. Not the practice or my fucking reputation. Not even the license I spent half my life earning. I would burn it all I if that meant having her. But even if I did, it would change the fact that I have lost her.

Julia sat in that chair and told me things she had never told anyone because she believed professional boundaries meant I would never use access to her vulnerability for anything else. Then she gave Ghost parts of herself because she believed he was separate from the man holding those secrets. Whatever my intentions had been, I stole the distinction. I stole the information she needed to decide what belonged to whom. I stole her right to choose when that was exactly what I had been working so hard with her all the last couple of months — for her to understand that she has that right.

“She said I used everything she told me to get a good fuck.” The words barely make it out.

Mara winces. “Did you?”

“No.”

There is finally something immediate in my answer because that accusation is the one thing I cannot let settle into truth simply because I deserve the rest.