Page 16 of Stripping Bare
Especially after he’d been such a wild kid as a teen. When he’d come to see Tessa, he’d given her his background, including all the drugs, rebellion, and a couple of rehab jailbreaks. When he was seventeen, his brokenhearted parents had been close to writing himoff.
Finally, Davey had hit rock bottom after his so-called girlfriend had OD’d on a chemical cocktail of painkillers, sedatives, and muscle relaxers. He’d woken to find her dead beside him in the bed. That was when he’d gottenclean.
But it hadn’t been without struggle over the years. He’d known the pressure of video game development would test him. Any time the pressure mounted, he’d schedule a coaching session with her. And between talking with her occasionally and keeping up with his NA meetings, he’d been copingwell.
At least he had been the last time she talked with him. In fact, he’d been dating someone new, a woman he thought might be the love of hislife.
As she scanned the scanty details in the article, Tessa’s few sips of wine felt like Drano in her stomach. Davey’s life had been reduced to less than five hundredwords.
Tessa pushed away from her desk, and Badger jumped down to trot behind her. Absently, she picked up her glass, carried it to the kitchen, and poured the wine into the sink. Then she washed the glass and placed it on the dryingrack.
When she made another lap around the house and found herself opening the fridge and organizing the contents by food groups and color, she knew she needed to sit down and think. Some people sleepwalked when stressed. Tessa, on the other hand, woke to alphabetized canned goods in hercabinets.
She needed to understand what had happened with Davey. He’d had a regular therapist in addition to her. She made it clear to all her clients that her focus was on workplace coping skills, productivity, andperformance.
Stress and overwhelm, she could handle. Addiction and suicide were on an entirely differentlevel.
What had Carson said? Something about wanting her to stop e-mailing him. Which didn’t make any sense because she hadn’t seen or spoken to him formonths.
She hurried back to her computer and again Badger hopped into her lap. She opened her e-mail and clicked on her sentitems.
Scrolling through the outgoing e-mails, she mentally flicked through all the names. Her dad, the closing company for her new condo, the organizations she’d talked with about Martin & Associates corporatecoaching.
This was stupid. She could just search, so she typed in Carson’s name. A list of a dozen e-mails popped up, most of them to schedule sessions months in the past. But one was much more recent, just a few daysago.
That was the day the movers had delivered her furniture and household goods. All her time had been spent directing placement and unpacking boxes. She hadn’t opened her computer all day, and she certainly hadn’t sent an e-mail toCarson.
Something solid blocking her airway, Tessa clicked on themessage.
Carson,
You trusted the wrong person. You should’ve been more careful who you told about that little stalking incident when you were in your early twenties. Because that information could sure be dangerous if it gets into the wronghands.
But half a million could make it goaway.
Let’s stay intouch,
TessaM.
With shaking hands, she stroked Badger’s back. “King B, what is happeninghere?”
Why she’d even triedto sleep, Tessa had no idea. Her mind had whirled around like a lopsided ceiling fan all night. Turning, clanging against itself, making a godawful racket inthere.
So at six she slid out of bed, pulled on a long sweater, and took Badger out to the doggie park. The chill outside made him frisky, and he bounded around the enclosure, his ears lifting parallel to the ground and giving him the appearance of a 747 duringtakeoff.
But he also knew breakfast was coming, so he didn’t object when she put him on leash and headed inside. In fact, it was amazing how hard an eleven-pound dog could pull a full-sizehuman.
While he was eating, she took her laptop out to the balcony overlooking Reuter Terrace. The sun was still trying to decide its plan for the day, creeping up like a skittish animal, only to be eclipsed by a horde of winterclouds.
I could use some Carolina sunshinetoday.
She flipped open her computer and stared at the e-mail still on the screen. When she’d read it last night, it had been like a knife to the lungs, and she’d snapped the laptop closedimmediately.
Denial. As a professional, she knew the label for her own actions. But all humans, no matter how self-aware, used defense mechanisms for a reason.Survival.
And fixating on that e-mail wouldn’t get her one inch closer to figuring out what was going on with Carson and Davey, so she clicked it closed. The Seattle news channel websites didn’t offer up much more information than they had the last time she looked. In fact, the newer articles barely mentioned Davey, and only in the context of the increase in suicides around the holidays, which was amyth.
It made Tessa want to pick up the phone and berate someone for their lack of fact-checking, but she reined in her displaced anger and refocused on the realissue.
