Chapter 19
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— Holden —
Week seven, I stopped sleeping more than three hours at a stretch. I wasn’t eating much either. Dutch had noticed and told the kitchen to put food in front of me twice a day, which was the kind of direct intervention he didn’t bother dressing up as concern.
This morning he found me sitting on the edge of my bed, still in yesterday’s clothes, trying to remember why I was supposed to get up. The list of reasons was shorter than it used to be, and the effort of constructing it from scratch felt like moving furniture through water.
“You look like shit,” he said, leaning in the doorway.
“I know.”
“You’ve looked like shit for seven weeks.”
“I know.”
He was quiet for a moment. “You going to do something about it?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
He nodded once, like that was acceptable for now, and left me to it. I sat there for another forty minutes after he was gone.
Then I picked up my phone. Not to call Bea. I’d made that decision, and I wasn’t far gone enough to go back on it. But I pulled up the internet and searchedgrief therapistandtrauma, and I sat there looking at the results for a while.
Colt found me like that. He knocked on the open door and came in without waiting, sat down in the chair by the desk. “Dutch said you were brooding.”
“Dutch sends scouts now?”
“Dutch worries in his own language.” Colt leaned back, crossed his arms. He had the particular patience of a man who’d spent seven years in his own version of this—not identical, nothing was identical, but related. He knew what sitting in a room with yourself felt like when there was nowhere to put it. “You thinking about getting some help?”
I looked at the phone. “Maybe.”
“I can get a name. Bea’s—” He stopped himself. “I know someone.”
My jaw tightened. I kept my eyes on the phone until the screen went dark. Then I set it down. “Dr. Larkin. Peter Larkin. He works with first responders.”
Colt raised an eyebrow slightly.
“I’ve had his number for a while,” I said. “Just hadn’t made the call.”
“What stopped you?”
I didn’t have a clean answer. “I wasn’t ready. I knew I needed to do it and I still couldn’t pick up the phone. Every time I got close I’d convince myself next week would be better.”
“Yeah.” Colt was quiet for a moment. “That’s how it works, though.”
“What?”
“It gets worse before it gets better.”
“Yeah.” I looked at him. “You’d know.”
He didn’t push. Didn’t tell me what to do or give me a speech about what it had done for him. He just sat there, a presence that wasn’t going anywhere, and let the silence be what it was.
After a while I picked up my phone again and found the number and called before I could talk myself out of it.
Larkin’s receptionist answered on the third ring. She asked if it was urgent. I said no, because that’s what you say when you’ve spent seven weeks not asking for help — you don’t start by admitting how bad it is. The next available was several weeks out. I took it.
