Page 144 of Fault Lines
“Come in,” she said, and I followed, steeling myself for the hour ahead.
She gestured to the couch—no armrests, deliberately uncomfortable—while she took the wingback chair opposite. A small white noise machine hummed in the corner, filling the air with what I’d once assumed was ocean waves, but on closer inspection sounded like a malfunctioning radiator. It was the only sound besides the clock.
She waited. She was good at that, too.
I sat there, staring at the tiny patch of carpet where two colors didn’t quite match. I realized I was holding my breath, so I exhaled, slow.
“How have you been sleeping?” she asked. It was always her opening move, a little ritual that signaled the start of play.
I shrugged. “About the same.”
She didn’t bother to ask for a scale, or how many hours per night. She already knew. “Nightmares?”
“Not so much.” The dreams were never violent, just… relentless. Livi’s face, over and over. Her voice. The hollow in the bed where her body should have been.
She nodded, as if that confirmed a hypothesis I hadn’t realized I was proving.
“What about eating?” she pressed.
I hesitated. “It’s fine. I’m eating.” That was a lie, but I knew she could see it.
She waited for a beat, then shifted tactics. “Last week, you said you’d been thinking about your father. Why don’t we start there?”
I tensed, involuntary. “It’s not relevant.”
“Why not?”
I could have given her a dozen reasons. Instead, I said, “I don’t want to talk about him.”
She studied me. Not a stare, but a gentle probing, like she was waiting to see how long I could stand the silence. I tried to outlast her, but that was never possible.
“Tell me about your relationship with your parents,” she said.
I exhaled again. “I’ve told you before. There wasn’t one. My dad was always gone, my mom was—” I searched for the right word, landed on the least inflammatory. “—busy.”
Dr. Stiles folded her hands. Her nails were perfectly trimmed, bare of polish. “And when your father was home?”
I shook my head. “He wasn’t. Not really. He’d sit in his chair and read the paper and wait for dinner. Sometimes he’d yell. Mostly he just wanted me quiet. The TV was always on, as loud as possible.”
“And your mother?”
I let out a bitter laugh. “She was a ghost. Did everything she was supposed to, but only because she was afraid of the consequences if she didn’t. If I was out of sight, I was out of mind. I don’t remember ever being hugged by her. Not once.”
Dr. Stiles nodded. “That must have been lonely.”
I braced for her to say more, to fill the silence with a platitude. But she let the words hang, just heavy enough to crush me if I let them.
“I was an only child,” I said, as if that explained it all. “I didn’t have friends. We moved every year or two, sometimes less. There wasn’t a point in starting over.”
She made a note—mental, not written. “What did you want from them?”
I chewed on that. It wasn’t something I’d ever let myself articulate, even to myself. “I guess… I wanted them to care. To be present. To make me feel like I mattered.”
“And did you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She let a moment pass, then said, “You’ve told me before how important it was for you to have a family of your own. Can you tell me why?”
