She was relieved that Christian didn’t feel the need to fill every silence, something Becca often failed at. He parked at a meter, and together they headed toward Downtown Mission a half a block away. The sidewalks reeked of rotting garbage, the stench of urine filling the air. Every now and then, they’d encounter an unknown stink so sharp, they’d have to plug their noses. Rats skittered about, undeterred by their presence. They crossed the street, passing a young mother and her daughter, a toddler no more than three years old, fast asleep on a flattened box in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Fucking disgrace,” Christian said under his breath. Becca agreed. When she saw things like that, her job seemed like an exercise in futility. She would have to remind herself again and again of all the people whose lives she influenced: the teenage girl with the eating disorder she convinced to seek treatment; the family of five she relocated to an apartment; even Raya, whom she managed to get off the streets. This work was her calling, her salvation.

Becca’s parents never spoke about their feelings, never acknowledged their own pain. They locked it away, pretending it didn’t exist. After Robbie died, Becca spent years floundering, forced to suffer in silence. An Intro to Psych class in college turned that all around, and she became obsessed with reading about and studying trauma and PTSD and various mental disorders. She realized that she wanted to connect with people who had experienced trauma, to aid the emotional wounds others couldn’t see. Becca earned her BA in psychology at USC and then a master’s and PhD at UCLA. During all those years of study, she survived on financial aid and student loans, working in clinics counseling troubled girls, working for an organization that found housing and jobs for battered women, teaching life skills to youth offenders. She studied her ass off, writing papers late into the night after working all day.

After gaining enough hours to earn her license, she made the decision to open her own private practice. She would earn two to three times more, not to mention she could make her own schedule. She told herself it would give her time to volunteer for causes that were important to her. Having her own business would also give Becca time to raise a family, something she naively assumed would happen when she was ready. With Christian’s encouragement, she rented office space in Beverly Hills, and her private practice took off.