“It was… fine.” I really don’t want to dive into this with her. This is a wound I’m not interested in opening, but she’s going to give me no choice. She’s a shark when it comes to trauma and denial.

“Just fine? Can you elaborate for me?” Her face is always neutral. She never gives away how she’s reacting to anything I say, but I swear, there is faint amusement dancing in her eyes right now. She knows I’m avoiding.

I rub a hand over my face, dragging in a deep breath. “There’s a new professor on campus. He started the day I returned. A new English professor.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It’s, uh, it’s someone I know.”

“Go on,” she urges gently.

“It’s Cash. The new professor that started the very day I got back to campus is Cash.”

“Cash, from back in Washington?”

“The one and only,” I reply with a humorless laugh.

“Is this the real reason you skipped our last couple of sessions?”

“No… I don’t know. Yes?”

“Alright. Why don’t you tell me how him being in Texas makes you feel?”

My gaze is fixated on a piece of lint next to the coffee table in front of me. It’s green and only about the size of a piece of rice. I’m fixated on it because I can’t bring myself to look at my therapist as I tell her how it makes me fucking feel.

“It makes me feel like all the skeletons in my closet that I’ve tucked away have emerged, coming back to haunt me. It felt like a slap to the face and a knife to my chest all at once seeing his face on his first day. Hearing his casual, gravelly voice took me back five years to nights spent under the stars, dreams of the future, and then absolute devastation.”

“Do you remember how long it took for you to tell me about Cash when you first started visiting me?”

“I don’t know. A few weeks?”

“It was six weeks, Stone. Six weeks. Twelve appointments before you divulged this huge part of yourself to me.”

“Okay? Why does that matter?”

“It matters because he was a huge part of the guilt you carried when you arrived. You hated yourself for leaving him without a word. You hated knowing that you hurt him. And I think a subconscious part of yourself kept this from me for as long as you did because you couldn’t fathom talking about it—and healing—because you felt you didn’t deserve to move on from it. Now he’s here, and it’s like you’re having to reopen that old wound all over again and face it all.”

“What do I do, then?”

“Let’s start at the beginning. Does he know about Aida and why you left?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Maybe you should start there.”