Page 39 of Logan

My easy answer seemed to surprise him, and he looked back at the screen like I’d just illuminated the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

“When? What was it like?”

Since this was gearing up to be a long conversation, I moved over to the comfortable armchair near my bed and propped the phone up against a couple of books. “The first time was right after I got out of the Air Force. I’d seen other people I served with struggle to make the adjustment back to civilian life, and I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps. The second time...” I hesitated.

Would my answer hit too close to home and upset Clay, or would it bring him comfort?

Either was a possibility.

Deciding to take the risk, I answered honestly.

“The second time was after some undercover work I did a few years ago. Working for the bad guys, even if it was just pretend, messed with my head for a while. Why do you ask?”

Clay must have propped his own phone up on something, because I could now see both of his hands in the frame of the screen, twisting around each other like he meant to tie his fingers into knots.

“Was it... I mean... How did it make you feel?”

I grimaced, and my exaggerated expression managed to earn a small chuckle from Clay. “It wasn’t fun. Kinda feels like dissecting your own brain, and you often don’t like what you find, but overall, it helped in the end. Why? How does it make you feel?”

That must have been what was weighing on Clay. The moment I asked the question, he immediately stopped fidgeting and fell deathly still instead.

“I don’t like it,” he said in a small voice, almost whispering. “It makes me feel...” He shook his head, and his shoulders slumped until he looked even smaller on the screen. “I don’t want to go back. It isn’t going to help.”

Running my hand though my hair, I took a moment to choose my words carefully. “Therapy isn’t an immediate cure. It takes time. The mind is tricky. Isn’t like a broken leg that you can heal just by slapping a cast on it. You’re going to have to dig up a lot of painful things in order to figure out how to heal them, and that can feel really bad at first. But I promise, it will be worth it in the end.”

My hopes of reassuring him were dashed as I watched him curl up on the window seat until his arms were wrapped around his knees. It was exactly the same position I’d found him in when I barged into his apartment in San Francisco.

“I told Jason I didn’t want to go back, and we fought about it. He said the same thing.”

Not for the first time, I hated the miles between Maryland and Louisiana. I wanted nothing more than to reach out to him, but the distance made that impossible. If he were even a single stateover, I probably would have gotten in my car and driven to him that night. However, seven states were a much harder obstacle to overcome.

“Look…” I sighed again. “Neither Jason nor I can make you do something you don’t want to do. But?—”

There wasn’t even time for me to try and make an argument before he cut me off.

“I do want to do it. I want to get better. I want to finally feel okay in my own head, and I don’t mind if the process is difficult or painful. I just don’t want to have to relive the details over and over. I’ve already lived through it all, once. I can’t do it again.”

“Wait a minute…” I instinctively held up my hand to cut off his rambling, even though I couldn’t actually reach him from so far away. “You’ve only been to two appointments, right? What kind of details would you be getting into already?”

“Everything,” Clay practically exploded. “This guy, Doctor... whatever his name is. He wants to know details about everything. Like... okay, so, we were talking about when I was kidnapped. And I thought that made sense because that’s where it all started. But then we got into the first time I was made to... you know, do anything. And this doctor guy kept asking about what they made me do and how they made me do it. When I tried to just give a vague answer, he insisted that I had to describe things in detail. He said I’d never heal if I didn’t face the reality of what happened to me, but I have faced it. I faced it every day, for years. Why do I have to relive these things again? This doesn’t feel like it’s helping me. It feels like...”

The energy of his sudden outburst drained away like someone had pulled a plug inside him and emptied him out. I halfexpected to see him deflate like a balloon as he wrapped his arms around his knees again.

“It feels like I’m catering to another client, only this time I’m the one paying.”

On the surface, Clay’s description of his therapy sessions sounded inappropriate. The protective side of me was tempted to storm back off to the other side of the country and demand that therapist have his license revoked.

However, Clay wasn’t the first victim of sexual violence that I’d dealt with. I’d seen firsthand how people dealing with his kind of trauma could misinterpret innocent situations and twist them into threats. As much as I wanted to just believe him, I couldn’t trust his mental state enough to take his description at face value.

That didn’t mean I was going to disregard his concerns. Whether the therapist was actually being inappropriate or not, there was something we needed to do either way.

“I think you need to change to a different therapist, Clay. Maybe this therapist has honest intentions. Maybe he doesn’t. I promise, I’ll look into it. However, I do know that therapy works a lot better if you’re comfortable with the therapist, which you clearly aren’t. So, how about this… I’ll call your brother, and we’ll see about getting you moved to a different therapist. I don’t know the therapists in your area, but I can probably call around and get some recommendations. If we do manage to find a therapist that you’re comfortable with, will you promise to give it another try and stick with it for a while?”

Clay agreed, but the mood of the conversation had definitely soured. Not wanting to leave on such a negative note, I asked him to tell me about something fun that he’d done recently.

At first, he looked hesitant, but then his gaze landed on something just off screen, and his eyes lit up.

“Oh, yeah.” He grabbed several books and held them up in front of the camera. “So, Jason and Patrick have a bunch of books in the house, but Patrick noticed I wasn’t enjoying them, so he took me to the bookstore to pick out some for myself. I wasn’t sure what to think of him at first, but he’s a pretty nice guy. Like an actually nice guy, you know. Not one of those self-proclaimedNice Guys.”

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