“What were you afraid would happen?”
“That she’d fall in. Get swept away…. That I’d lose her the same way I lost Cisco.”
Elena made a note. I tried not to wonder what it said.
“We’ve discussed that your brain was protecting you,” she said evenly. “It didn’t understand Alex was safe. It only understood threat.”
“Doesn’t change that I hurt her.”
Elena was quiet for a moment. Then, “we talked about what happened in our emergency session. The command voice, ordering her away from the creek. But I want to understand what that moment cost you. Emotionally.”
My jaw worked. “I became the thing I swore I’d never be with her.”
“What thing?”
“Someone who makes her feel small. Incompetent. Stupid andreckless.” My hands flexed against my thighs again. “She’d been proving herself capable all day… all month… and I just… dismissed all of that. Treated her like she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Because your brain perceived her as being in danger.”
“Yes. My brain. Not me,” I huffed. “But she didn’t get to separate those things. She just got the guy yelling at her to get away from the water.”
“Finn, look at me.”
I met her eyes.
“Your PTSD response wasn’t about Alex’s competence. It was about your brain perceiving mortal danger and trying to eliminate the threat. That’s not you deciding to hurt her. That’s trauma hijacking your nervous system.”
“Still hurt her.”
“Yes. But understanding the mechanism helps you build better responses for next time.” She wrote something down and looked back at me. “Because there will be a next time. PTSD doesn’t just disappear. We’re building tools to make the episodes less frequent, less severe, and give you both strategies for managing them when they happen.”
I hated the certainty in her voice—hated that she was right even more.
“What kind of tools?”
“Recognizing early warning signs before you hit crisis. Grounding techniques that interrupt the panic spiral. Communication strategies so Alex knows what’s happening and how to help.” Elena paused. “But first we need to understand what led up to that moment. Walk me through the hours before the creek incident again. Be specific.”
So I did. The rain that wouldn’t stop, water everywhere, the constant roar of it. Working until my body screamed at me to stop, then pushing past it because the ranch needed protecting. The building sensory overload—wet clothes, cold, exhaustion, pain in my left side intensifying.
“You were already compromised before you got to the creek,” Elena observed.
“I was functional. Got the work done.”
“Functional and safe are different things,” she set her pen down. “What were you telling yourself while you were working? When your body was screaming at you to stop?”
I stared at the window. “That I didn’t have a choice. The ranch needed protecting.”
“Did you actually not have a choice? Or did asking for help feel impossible?”
My shoulders tightened. “Dad was out there. Luke. Mike. They were doing the same thing. Pushing through.”
“They don’t have TBI and PTSD. You do.” There was no judgment in her voice. “Expecting yourself to function at the same capacity isn’t realistic. It’s a setup for exactly what happened.”
“Functional isn’t the same as okay, Finn,” she continued. “You pushed yourself past reasonable limits, which made you more vulnerable to a PTSD trigger.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to say that’s what you do—you push through, complete the mission, worry about the cost later. But that was military thinking. And I wasn’t military anymore.
“So what should I have done? Let my family handle it alone while I stayed inside because I was tired?”
