“Two months after our treatment, he began to have seizures. The doctors thought it was epilepsy, but there were no abnormalities in his EEG. They sent him back to me, and I realized his brain was rebelling against what we’d done. The actual memory of the event was gone, but the underlying trauma was still there. It took a much longer series of traditional treatments to work his way through it.”

Jason didn’t ask why she was telling him this.

“Heights have never bothered me before,” she went on, “but do you know what I see when I look down now?”

“What?”

“I see my father at the base of the cliff. That’s strange because I wasn’t there. I was at our campsite when he went hiking. I never saw my father’s body. I was never on the cliff, and I never looked over the edge. The rangers found him. And yet I can see it in my head, Jason. I can see him lying there.”

“What do you want me to say?” her husband asked.

“I want you to admit what you did to me. You changed my memory of that weekend, didn’t you? All along, I thought that I’d blocked it out. All I could see were images. Snapshots. But they were images you planted there, right? You erased what really happened. You erased what I saw.”

Jason stood in front of her, his face a mask. “Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“Because you asked me to,” he said.

Frankie closed her eyes. He wasn’t lying. She’d already realized what the truth had to be. This was something she’d chosen.

“Was any of it real?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Did he really say he was proud of me?”

Jason didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, “Why go down this road, Frankie? There’s a reason you wanted to forget it.”

“I want to know,” she snapped. “Tell me.”

“No, your father never said that.”

“You lied to me. You planted a lie in my head.”

“A lie? Get over yourself. It’s no different than what you do with patients every day. You take away bad memories, and you replace them with better memories. Don’t blame me if you don’t like your own medicine.”