Why?
That was the part I couldn’t get past. Why would my therapist do this? I’d been running through every session, every conversation, every interaction I’d ever had with Janelle trying to find the moment I missed. The red flag I walked past. The thing she said or did that should’ve told me this woman was dangerous. And I couldn’t find it. Because there wasn’t one. She’d been flawless. Eight months of warmth and empathy and carefully placed tissues and “let’s unpack that” and not a single crack in the mask.
What did I do to this woman?
I didn’t owe her money. I’d never disrespected her. I’d never even been late to a session. I was a good client. I showed up, did the work, cried when I needed to, paid my copay, and left. That was it. There was no beef. No history. No reason for a licensed therapist to drug me in a parking garage and chain me to a ceiling in an abandoned warehouse next to the man I’d been keeping in a cage.
Unless it wasn’t about me at all.
That thought landed heavy. Because if this wasn’t about something I did, then it was about someone I was connected to.And the list of people in my life who carried enough weight to make a woman go this far was very, very short.
I didn’t have the answer. Not yet. But I was going to get it.
Thad was still talking. I wasn’t listening anymore. I was testing the chain, feeling for weak links, measuring the slack. I was counting exits. There was one door, far end, the one Janelle had used to bring me in. I was calculating the distance between my feet and his wheelchair and whether I could swing hard enough to connect with his already-ruined knees if he got any closer. He was too weak to hurt me. His arms could barely push the wheels. Whatever Janelle had planned, Thad wasn’t the weapon. He was the audience.
The warehouse was quiet except for the fluorescent light buzzing and Thad’s raspy voice running his mouth about his angel and his salvation and all the other delusional bullshit men tell themselves when a woman does something nice for them once. I tuned him out and focused on the only thing that mattered.
Janelle wasn’t here. Not yet. Which meant she was coming back. And when she did, she was going to walk into this warehouse expecting to find the same woman she’d been manipulating for eight months—the one who cried on her couch, the one who followed her breathing exercises, the one who trusted her enough to say things out loud that she’d never told another living person.
That woman was gone.
The woman hanging from this chain had survived her father’s house, her husband’s fists, and a cage she built with her own hands. She’d shot a man, stabbed a man, beaten a man’s knees until they broke, and walked away from all of it with her heart still beating and her mind still sharp. She had been underestimated by every man and every monster she’d ever met and she was still here.
Janelle thought she knew me because I’d talked to her on a couch. But she’d only met the version of me that was trying to heal. She hadn’t met the version that did the damage in the first place.
She was about to.
3
Janelle
The woman sitting across from me had been talking for eleven minutes straight about her husband’s emotional unavailability, and I was counting the seconds between her breaths because that was more interesting than anything coming out of her mouth.
“He just shuts down,” she said for the third time since she sat down. “Like, I’ll try to have a conversation with him about something real, and he just… checks out.”
I nodded. I wrote something on my notepad that looked like a clinical observation but was actually a reminder to pick up more zip ties on the way home. “And when he checks out, what does that feel like in your body?”
She pressed her hand to her chest like she was about to deliver a monologue. “It feels like I’m invisible. Like I don’t even exist.”
Girl. You have no idea what invisible feels like.
I gave her the face. The one I’d perfected over eight years of practice, the one that said I hear you, I see you, your pain matters. It was a good face. Warm eyes, soft jaw, a slight tilt of the head that communicated empathy without crossing intopity. I could do that face in my sleep. I had done it in my sleep, rehearsing sessions in my dreams, running through the therapeutic scripts that made people trust me with the ugliest parts of themselves.
“That’s a very real feeling, Amber. And I want to validate that for you.” I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward half an inch, because people interpret forward movement as engagement and I needed her to feel engaged so she’d keep talking so the clock would keep moving so this session would end so I could get back to what actually mattered. “Have you considered telling Keith exactly what you just told me? Using those same words?”
Amber’s eyes got wide like I’d just handed her the nuclear codes. “You think I should just… say it to him? Like that?”
“I think the version of you that just spoke to me was honest and clear. And sometimes the most powerful thing we can do in a relationship is let someone see us without the armor.”
I almost laughed. The irony of me sitting here coaching this woman on vulnerability while I had another woman chained to a beam in a warehouse was something I could appreciate even if nobody else could. People think therapists have it all figured out. That we’ve done our own work, processed our own trauma, arrived at some elevated plane of emotional health that qualifies us to guide others. That’s cute. Some of us just got really good at the language.
Amber kept talking. I kept nodding. My phone was face down on the side table and I could feel it pulsing against the wood every few minutes. Clients, probably. Or my brother, who I’d been dodging for weeks. I ignored it because I didn’t want to be distracted from the mission at hand. I wanted to torture Mehar to death for taking what was mine. I thought I was over it. I could’ve sworn I was. Years had passed and I had moved on. I buried my son. Went to school and became a therapist. I was helping people and living my life. I traveled and shopped.I bought a home, decorated that home, then redecorated that home.
After years of not seeing him, I’d moved on, or so I thought. It’s funny how that works. I knew he still lived in town. I saw in the papers how he had grown Banks Reserve to new heights. I’d read all about the new casino. I knew about his mother being arrested for murder. I’d followed him closely, but hadn’t seen him up close in a while.
I’d heard through my brothers about his little poly relationship. I knew that wasn’t anything serious. When he was with me, he was talking about marriage. He was very much monogamous. Those two bitches he had weren’t a threat to anything. I knew in my heart of hearts he wasn’t taking them seriously.
But when I saw him that day at the restaurant, something triggered me. I was walking by, just minding my business. I had just left the Chinese carryout that was on the same block as Ray’s. As I was walking by, her outfit caught my eye because I recognized it from a previous session we’d had. I slowed down. Looked through the window. And there she was, sitting in a booth with him. Comfortable. Easy. Looking at him like he was giving her something she’d been starving for. And he was looking at her the way he used to look at me. That focused, locked-in attention where the rest of the room disappears and there’s only one person worth seeing. I used to live in that look. I used to be the reason for it.
