1
Henley stared at the calendar on the desk. It was one of those feel-good calendars. Enjoy Every Moment was emblazoned in gold against an abstract print in bright primary colors while the date stared back at her. Monday 17 February. There was nothing special about the date. No landmark occasions, not even a dentist appointment. It was just a day.
“Are you OK?”
Dr. Isabelle Collins stopped pouring green tea from a glass teapot as Henley placed her head between her knees.
“I’m fine,” Henley replied. She closed her eyes and waited for the familiar but uncomfortable moment to pass.
“Are you sure?”
“It doesn’t happen all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It all means something. Would you like to tell me what it was that set you off?”
“No,” said Henley, straightening herself up.
“I’ve been telling you that these sessions usually work best when you talk,” Dr. Collins replied as she continued to pour herself a cup of tea into a porcelain cup. “It’s 7:43 a.m.”
“And you’re disappointed that I haven’t opened up in the past twelve minutes.”
“A watched pot never boils, Anjelica.”
“God, you sound like my mother.”
“Hmm, that’s the first time that you’ve mentioned her in five months. In fact, that’s the most that you’ve said in the first fifteen minutes of a session.”
“I thought you said that a watched pot never boils.”
“That’s true, but the second that you take your eye off the pot, it’s bound to spill over. I told you in our very first session that I had no intention of wasting your time or mine. I would get a cat if I was looking for non-verbal company.”
“You’re a bit snappy this morning,” Henley said with a raised eyebrow.
Dr. Collins shrugged. “As I said. It’s been five months. I want to be in a position to satisfactorily send you on your way, knowing that you’ve done the work, reached a place where you’re able to accept what happened to you and live your life without the fear that you’re going to implode. You need to talk honestly about what’s happened to you, and that includes the loss of your mother.”
“Just because I mentioned my mum’s name doesn’t mean that there’s suddenly going to be an outpouring of grief,” Henley said. She ran her finger round the collar of her polo neck and pulled it away from her skin.
“I’m not asking for the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but perhaps some recognition of the fact that it will be a year since your mother passed?”
“I’m aware of that.”
“And it doesn’t concern you? That sense of cold detachment.”
“It’s not detachment. I can’t detach myself from my mother like she’s an investigation that I’m working on, but I can compartmentalize so that it doesn’t keep me up at night.”
“‘It’? The fact that it’s not keeping you up at night or that you’re not thinking about her during the day, right now, in this moment. You’re dismissing her.”
Henley stared back at Dr. Collins. She had lost count of these moments. The challenges that she couldn’t defend herself from. Dr. Isabelle Collins didn’t subscribe to the touchy-feely practice which Henley’s previous therapist, Dr. Afzal, had used. Henley had suffered through three sessions with Dr. Afzal before she threw in the towel. Dr. Collins stabbed, provoked and then sat back and watched. Henley still hadn’t worked out if this was how Dr. Collins treated all her patients or if Henley’s mere presence wound her up every second Monday morning. Henley shuffled in her chair and resisted the urge to take off her jacket, even though Dr. Collins had made sure that the temperature of her office was near tropical.
“It concerns me that you’re still not willing to talk about your mother or your old boss, DCS Rhimes,” said Dr. Collins.
“I don’t need to talk about Rhimes, and my mum is not the reason why I’m sitting in this chair,” said Henley. “I know where she is. She’s in an oak casket, six feet underground at Brockley cemetery. Plot number 19R5QA.”
“But you don’t know where Olivier is?”
Henley stiffened at the sound of his name. She’d done her best to forget about the man who’d intended to add her to his long list of murdered victims, not once but twice. Henley had spent too much energy trying to convince herself that Peter Olivier was dead and that he couldn’t touch her, but there were days when she swore that she could feel his breath on her neck.
“I know that we’ve been through this, but we’re five months in. Logically, what does your brain tell you? Imagine yourself talking to a victim’s family.”
The knots in Henley’s shoulders tightened. She breathed in and thought back to what Pellacia, her boss and ex-lover, had told her from his hospital bed.
“I would tell them that no one could survive that water,” said Henley. “He’d already been injured before I even...before he attacked me.”
“But you’re still doubtful that he’s dead?”
“I’m not doubtful.”
“You told your husband that Olivier was dead.”
“It’s what he needed to hear. How would that have helped us if he believed that Olivier was still out there?”
“But how is that helping you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You still haven’t let go, Anjelica. There won’t be any room for anything else in your life the longer that you hold on to the notion that Olivier is still alive.”
“Maybe it would be easier for me to let go if I’d seen Olivier cut into bloody pieces, with his intestines all over the carpet like his copycat, Dominic Pine, but that didn’t happen.”
Unfazed, Dr. Collins picked up the hardback notebook which she’d tucked down the side of her chair and opened the pages. “I prescribed you a lower dosage of Zopiclone last month. Is that not helping?” she asked.
“Oh, it helps all right,” said Henley. “It knocks me right out, but I can’t function when I wake up. I feel like I’m moving about in a fog.”
“So, what you’re telling me is that you’ve stopped taking them?”
“I need to do my job.”
“Which job is that? Wife, mother, or detective?”
Henley felt a flush of anger wash over her. “Is that a criticism? Are you suggesting that I put my job over my...my duties at home?”
“I can’t answer that for you. You can make that your homework. Be honest with yourself about what you want.”
“I know what I want. I want to be able to wake up and not have the feeling that someone is crushing my chest. I want to not end the day in an emotional mess.”
“That’s not going to happen until you finally decide what it is that you really need to come to terms with. Olivier is a trigger but you and I both know that you’re holding on to a lot more than that.”
The snow began to fall. Henley zipped her coat as far as it could go and pulled her hat firmly onto her head, stepping out of the converted warehouse on Shad Thames, where Dr. Isabelle Collins lived and worked, and onto a cobbled street slick with black ice. Icicles hung dangerously from the iron gantries that connected the buildings on both sides of the street. Henley chastised herself as she walked toward her car. She’d been the one to ask for help. She’d handed Dr. Collins’s creased business card to Rob and begged him to make an appointment for her. An appointment that Henley had canceled twice. She had promised herself that she would bare her soul, convinced that it would be easier to talk to someone who had no attachment to her. The minute she had sat down on the pale green sofa she had clammed up, spilling the steaming hot coffee from her overfilled cup onto the scarred skin of her right hand. Henley felt like a fraud.
“Oi. Step away,” Henley shouted out, spotting a traffic warden approaching her car. She tried to run but stopped and grabbed the lamppost when she lost her footing on the icy pavement.
“This is residents only,” the traffic warden said as he took out his handhold computer.
“Not on this side of street. Mate, do not start with me,” said Henley. She reached her car and pulled her car keys out of her pocket. “Controlled parking doesn’t start until 8:30 a.m. and it’s only...” she checked the time on her phone, “8:29 a.m. Step back.”
Henley resisted the urge to flash her warrant card in the traffic warden’s face as he reluctantly stepped back, and she opened the car door. She turned on the engine and waited for the car to warm up as the snow fell onto the windscreen and the pavements began to fill with people begrudgingly making their way toward their jobs in the city, and she made her way back to the Serial Crime Unit.
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