“That’s what therapists always say. You’re not perfect. You’re human. I thought you were going to be different. I thought you were going to tell me the truth,” Chase said, looking up at Olivia, her blue eyes crackling like the fire before her.

“I am telling you the truth. We have two responses to situations such as that one—fight or flight. What might have happened had you stayed?”

Chase pressed her fingers to her eyes and groaned. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Okay, we don’t have to.” Olivia rose from the hearth. “Let’s go upstairs and get our rooms in order.”

Chase glanced up at her. “You’re not going to make me tell you, like, what I should have done?”

“No. I showed you what to do. You have to advocate for yourself, and you are strong enough to do that. You have agency.” Olivia went to the dining room table, picked up the tub, and started up the stairs. No way was she going to push Chase to unearth her emotions. Of course, she knew walking away would make Chase examine what she should have done even more closely. The woman’s mind would natter away, turning each situation this way and that, trying to decide what had indeed been the best course of action to handle the shame and censure she’d felt at the grocery store.

And that was a good thing. Chase had spent a lot of her life not thinking. Either she compulsively acted or others decided for her.

The upstairs of the cabin opened to a large in-between loft space lined with bookshelves holding old novels and board games she remembered playing as a child. Ratty boxes of puzzles sat stacked beneath a mountain landscape her grandmother had painted one summer when she’d taken an oil class. A large window seat overlooked the sloping yard that ran toward the creek. The leaves on the deciduous trees—the names of which escaped her—had started turning golden, tired of summer, ready for a respite and a soft landing in a month or so. In the background loomed misty, violet mountains framed against a fading sky. For a few seconds, she paused and looked at the familiar view, one she’d taken for granted as a child but that now summoned such nostalgia.

Why had she waited so long to come back to this place? Those lazy summers and the careworn hands of people who loved her had shaped her, had taught her lessons, had given her memories that she shouldn’t have let fade into the shadows. So why had she let what had happened with her father rob her of the joy she’d experienced in this place?