"Both," she said after a moment. "But the shield is bigger than the concern."
"What's the shield protecting?"
"Me. From believing this is real. From believing someone like her could want someone like me." The words came outraw and she hadn't planned them and she couldn't take them back. "Because if I can frame it as a professional violation, then it's a problem to be managed, not a relationship to be in. And problems are easier. I know how to manage problems. I don't know how to be loved."
The last three words sat in the room with a weight that pressed against her ribs. Sienna heard them and wanted to snatch them back and also wanted to say them again, louder, because they were true and she'd never said them to anyone.
Helen's eyes were warm. No pity in them. No alarm. Just steady, professional compassion.
"You said she gives you compliments and you can't accept them."
"My whole body rejects them. She tells me I'm beautiful and my first instinct is to argue. She tells me I'm incredible and I assume she's being kind. There's a voice in my head, my father's voice or my mother's voice or just the accumulated voice of a lifetime of not being told, that says I don't get to have this."
Helen's pen rested against her notepad, still. "Get to have what?"
Sienna looked at the window. The lane below was empty, afternoon sun falling across the sandstone wall of the building opposite. Her fingers tightened on the arm of the chair. "Someone who looks at me the way Elise looks at me. Someone who holds me while I cry and doesn't flinch. Someone who knows what I look like naked and vulnerable and a complete wreck and still wants to be there in the morning."
"But she was there in the morning."
Sienna's jaw trembled. "She was there in the morning."
Helen let the silence breathe. "And what did that feel like?"
"Like I was standing in a room that I'd been locked out of my entire life and someone had handed me the key." Sienna wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The tears had arrived, quieterthan the ones with Elise, but steady. "I keep waiting for the catch. For the moment she realises I'm not worth it."
Helen watched her with steady eyes. "Do you think she will?"
Sienna shook her head slowly. "The logical part of my brain says no. She's clear about what she wants. She's the most straightforward person I've ever met. She says what she means and means what she says and she's not playing games."
"And the part that isn't logical?"
"That part is still seventeen. On a tennis court. Wanting a girl and knowing that wanting had to be hidden."
Helen was quiet for a long while. Somewhere below them, in the physiotherapy clinic, a door closed and muffled voices spoke and went quiet again. Sienna listened to the quiet in Helen's office. It wasn't oppressive or loaded the silence at her parents' dinner table had been. Helen was giving her space.
"Tell me about the compliments specifically," Helen said. "What does Elise say?"
"She says I'm beautiful. She says I'm incredible. She told me I'm gorgeous when I blush." Sienna's face warmed at the memory. "She said she wanted to keep telling me until I believed it. And my reaction every single time is to deflect or argue or change the subject. She tells me I'm beautiful and I hear my mother's voice saying discipline matters more than appearance. She tells me I'm worth looking at and I hear my father's silence, which always meant I should keep working harder."
Helen wrote a single line on her notepad. "So Elise's words collide with your parents' programming."
Sienna nodded, her jaw tight. "Every time. She says something kind and I feel it hit and then I feel the rejection rise to meet it, like antibodies attacking a foreign body. My system has been trained to treat affection as an intrusion."
Helen reached for the tissue box and placed it on the arm of Sienna's chair. Sienna took a tissue and pressed it againsther eyes and laughed at herself, small and damp, because she was sitting in a therapist's office crying about being loved by a beautiful woman and there were worse problems to have.
"Here's what I want you to hear," Helen said. "The professional boundary. You're a sports medicine physician in a hockey programme. Elise is an adult athlete who is capable of making her own choices. This isn't a psychiatrist sleeping with a patient in crisis. The power dynamic is minimal and you both know it. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. I'm saying it's not the barrier you're building it into."
"Mara would?—"
Helen waved a hand. "Mara would be fine. You know Mara."
Sienna did know Mara. She thought of Mara's relationship with Lex, the coach-player dynamic that was an order of magnitude more complicated than anything between Sienna and Elise. Mara was Lex's direct superior. She controlled her playing time, her performance reviews, her career trajectory. And Mara had navigated it with pragmatism and honesty and the support of her own team, and she was happy. Genuinely happy. The kind of happiness that showed in the softening of her jaw and the light in her blue eyes when she talked about Lex, which she rarely did at work, but which was visible to anyone paying attention.
Sienna had been paying attention. She'd watched Mara balance the personal and the professional with a steady hand for months. If Mara could do that with stakes far higher than Sienna's, then the professional boundary Sienna was hiding behind was exactly what Helen said it was. A shield. Not a wall.
"The real work," Helen continued, "isn't about professional ethics. It's about letting yourself be seen. You've spent your whole life perfecting the surface. The competence, the calm, the control. And Elise is the first person who's gotten underneath it. That's why you're crying in my office. Not because you crosseda line with a patient. Because someone crossed a line with you, and you let them, and now you have to figure out what it means to be loved by someone who actually sees you."
The words soaked in like water into dry soil, layer by layer, and somewhere beneath the fear and the shame and the forty-one years of careful self-containment, a knot loosened. Not a dramatic unlocking. Not a wall crumbling. Just a slight easing of tension that had been held so tight for so long she'd forgotten it was there.
