“I know. Can we meet?”
Anna bit her lip. “I have a free hour at 3 PM.”
“I want more time,” Victoria said, keeping her voice low. “I’ll leave my number with your reception. Text me, we’ll arrange something. Are you free Sunday?”
Anna’s brown eyes widened. “We can’t go on a…”
“I’m not asking for one. I just want time to speak with you, have a proper conversation, away from this damn hospital. Can we have that?” It took effort, but Victoria kept her voice light, and managed a smile. “I only want to talk, Anna.”
Glancing around as people passed them to go in and out of the cafeteria, Anna was nervous, and by now chewing on her bottom lip. But eventually, she nodded. “Okay. We can talk. Yes, leave your information with Kathleen.”
“Excellent. Thank you.” Releasing her grip on Anna’s arm, Victoria smiled again, and nodded. Turning on her heel to walk off to her office was the hardest thing she thought she’d done in some time, especially when she could feel Anna’s curious, concerned gaze on her back, but she kept going.
With each step, her heartbeat whispered,Sunday, Sunday, Sunday…
Victoria paced the parquet floor in the Getty Center’s Rococo exhibit, a series of rooms so ornately gilded and frilly that they made her minimalist teeth absolutely ache. Nerves thrummed a song of tension and restrained hope just under the surface of her skin as she waited for Anna to arrive.
She’d chosen the Getty because it was so very unlike the hospital and, despite the overstimulating excess of the Rococo rooms, it was a place she loved to visit. Victoria often spent a free day here, or she had in the past. As she paced, she realized she hadn’t actually been here in some time. Since… well. Probably since before Hilary died.
Victoria let herself think of the word, let herself sit with it.Hilary died. Then she tested out some words she had notallowed herself to consider at all before.Hilary died, and it was not my fault.
Her stomach twisted, and she had to walk over to a tiny nearby visitor sitting room and take a seat, breathing in slow, deep breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth, just as Anna’s meditations had her do every night. “Hilary died,” she said aloud, quiet yet firm. “And it wasnotmy fault.”
“No, it wasn’t,” came a voice from the doorway, and Victoria looked up, startled. Anna stood there, hands in the pockets of her navy-blue blazer and a gentle smile playing on her lips. “Hello, there.”
“Hello.” Victoria got to her feet, wiping her hands down her thighs. “I’m sorry, I’d meant to be waiting for you out there.” She gestured towards the Rococo rooms.
“Not a problem. I found you, and it sounded like you were saying some things that you needed to hear from yourself.” Anna tilted her head. “Do you want to talk about that?”
“No. That is, yes, but…” Victoria surprised herself with the conviction in her voice. “Not right now. I will, on Tuesday. I set up an appointment.”
“I saw.” A nod, and a slight, ever so slight widening of her smile. “I’ll look forward to that, then.”
“Today, I…” Victoria breathed in deeply and walked back into the Rococo rooms, motioning for Anna to come and walk alongside her. “Today, I didn’t want to talk as therapist and patient. I wanted to just… be ourselves. Talk as if we had some sort of normal relationship.”
Anna’s brown eyes were wary, and rather than join Victoria as she strolled, she stopped and backed up a step, making Victoria stop as well. “We can’thavea relationship, Dr. Ellis.”
“Stop that,” Victoria pleaded. “Stop calling me that. My name is Victoria. Today I am simply Victoria, and you are Anna.”
“This was a bad idea.” Anna took another step back.
Victoria lurched forward and grabbed her by the arms. “Please, Anna.”
Anna stared up at her, consternation on her face. “What do youwantfrom me… Victoria? You don’t even particularly like me.”
“But I do like you.” She had to push the words out. Confessions that even remotely smelled like emotions did not come easy to Victoria and never had. And this one earned her a deeply skeptical look, hardly a reward. “Oh, all right. I didn’t at first. Quite resented you. You know that, you know why. But now…” She sought for the right words. “I have come to… want you. To know you.”
“When?” Anna’s jaw set, and her eyes were opaque, giving nothing away.
“The day I froze.” Victoria saw no point in beating around the bush. “You were right, that day. I did freeze in that surgery. And you confronted me, rightly so. You broke something open in me that day, Anna. Made me begin to think about how things had gotten so out of hand.”
Anna shook her head. “But that’s not… I was doing my job.”
“It’s something no one had ever forced me to do. Not even you, up to that point. You stopped dancing around me that day and once I’d gotten through the panic, I began to see Anna. Not Dr. Monroe.” Releasing Anna’s arms, trusting that she wouldn’t turn and flee, Victoria stepped back and wrapped her arms around her waist, breathing in again, so deeply this time that it almost made her a bit dizzy. “I saw the woman behind the calm, that someone with fire and heart existed past the therapy speak and endless patience.”
“Transference is a thing,” Anna said quietly, cautiously. “When a patient experiences a major breakthrough?—”
“I know about transference, thank you,” Victoria huffed. “Please give me some credit. This is not transference, I amnot taking my feelings for someone else and putting them onto you, because none of my past trauma has anything to do with romance.”
