Brenda’s story awakens the welter of emotion within Kavita. Her insides quake. She feels on the verge of breaking. She squeezes her arms around her midsection, tightly. As she tries to still herself, it occurs to Kavita, what shocks her almost as much as Brenda’s story, is the counsellor’s ability to speak about the nightmarish with ease, as if it is normal.

But that’s what it is, she realizes, isn’t it? For suicide survivors, the nightmarish is the norm. The nightmarish is what they wake to each morning, what they carry throughout the day, throughout their lives, unbeknownst to the world around them.

Brenda turns her attention to the woman sitting beside Kavita. The woman has long hair parted in the middle and it is dyed black. She is wearing a black leather jacket, black jeans, and sturdy black boots. She is biting her nails.

Brenda’s eyes float across the woman’s nametag. “Joan? Would you like to go next?”

The woman sits up straighter. As Joan shares, Kavita is too distracted by the rapid pace of her heartbeat to pay full attention, even though she wants to. Sparse words make it through: “rifle” and “found him” and “forty-six” and “three children.”

Kavita will have to share next. She doesn’t know what to say, or how to say it to this circle of strangers, these people she has barely known ten minutes. How can she tell them more than she has told her husband, her best friend, her parents? How can she reveal parts of herself to these people who will carry her story with them from the church basement, to their homes, into their lives? How can she trust them?

She glances around the circle. Maybe because she has no other choice. She promised to find a better way, and this is where that promise has led her. These people her collective, the one she has been longing for since Sunil’s death, the ones who understand as only they can.

Still, fear of speaking lights a fuse that travels from her heart, through her belly, to her feet. Why her feet? she wonders, as she becomes acutely aware of them inside her boots, the waves of energy buzzing from her heels, to her arches, to her toes, and back again, as if they are batteries charging up, as if her body is preparing to speed to the exit ahead of her thoughts.

“Kavita?” says Brenda, tilting her head to one side. “It’s your turn to share, if you’re ready. Although newcomers always get a free pass at their first meeting. It’s fine if you just want to sit and listen this time.”

The moment to speak has arrived, yet Kavita sits mutely. She thought her mind was made up before she descended into the church basement, but Brenda has offered her a way out, and with so many eyes upon her now, she can’t ignore the appeal.