Page 163 of Letters From A Stalker

There was only ever one man. I know that now. I just haven’t figured out yet whether that makes losing him easier or infinitely worse.

30

Kai

“If you had to choose one moment when everything changed, which one would it be?”

I look at the man sitting across from me and wonder whether psychiatrists are universally irritating or whether I’ve simply spent enough years on the other side of this arrangement to resent every technique I recognize.

Dr. Samuel Bennett waits without rescuing me from the question.

His office is nothing like mine. No dark leather chairs, no obsessively arranged desk, no clean lines intended to make the room feel controlled without making it sterile. Bennett apparently believes in bookshelves that bow beneath their own weight, an ancient rug that probably predates both of us and a ceramic mug on the table beside him with WORLD’S OKAYEST DAD printed across the side.

I have been coming here once a week for five weeks. I still hate the mug.

“What do you mean by changed?”

He gives me a look that tells me he knows exactly what I’m doing. “You know what I mean.”

Unfortunately, I do. I lean farther back and drag one thumb along the seam of my jeans. I stopped wearing suits almost immediately after I stopped working because putting one on without having somewhere legitimate to go felt vaguely pathetic. These days it is mostly jeans, T-shirts, hoodies and whatever survives the gym without smelling like something died in it.

The clinic has been closed to me since the day I reported myself. Technically, I could have continued practicing while the Board investigated unless and until they ordered otherwise. I just chose not to. There was no version of sitting across from another patient while an investigation into what I had done with Julia was moving through the Attorney General’s Office that felt remotely defensible. Mara handles the office. The other physicians handle the patients who were willing to transfer internally, everyone else was referred out. I go nowhere near clinical care.

And every Tuesday at ten, I sit in this fucking chair and discover how annoying my own profession can be.

“If I have to choose one moment,” I say eventually, “it wasn’t the first letter.”

Bennett waits.

“It wasn’t the first time I touched her either.”

“What was it?” The nudge was what I expected from him.

Doesn’t make it any less fucking annoying, but expected nevertheless.

“The night I followed her home.”

His expression remains neutral, but I have spent too many years doing what he does to mistake neutrality for absence of thought.

“She left my office dissociated after a difficult session. I knew she was oriented, but she wasn’t fully present, and I was worried about her driving.” I glance toward the rain making thin tracks down the window. “That concern was real. Her trauma hit something familiar in me because of what I grew up seeing, and watching her walk out looking like that, brought back enough of it that following her felt almost automatic.”

“But you don’t believe that was the whole reason anymore.”

“No.” The answer comes without resistance now.

Five weeks ago I would have built a fucking dissertation around why it was more complicated. Now I’ve come to realize that it isn’t complicated at all. It’s as simple as it is pathetic.

“I found her attractive from the first appointment.”

Bennett nods slightly, inviting me to continue.

“I noticed her before I had any right to notice her that way. I knew I noticed her, and because I never acted on attraction to a patient before, I apparently decided noticing wasn’t important as long as I continued behaving professionally.” I scrub one hand over my jaw. “Then she dissociated and I became genuinely worried, so my brain handed me something noble enough to hide behind.”

“You gave the concern permission.”

I glance at him.

“Yes.” The words sit heavily between us because they are accurate without being complicated.