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It felt as though I’d added a third person to the list of those who’d rejected me recently. Maybe he’d left the clinic and joined Tyler and Remy in a throuple. I hadn’t heard from either of them, either. No contact. No messages, and definitely no apologies.

I stood in the middle of my room, surrounded by mocking emptiness. “Caligo?”

Nothing.

“I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving tomorrow.”

Silence. Not even a flicker of movement.

“So if you wanted to say goodbye or something, you’ve got a limited amount of time to do it before I’m not here anymore.”

The seconds ticked by while I turned in a slow circle, searching for any sign of his presence. Perhaps he’d be waiting when I returned from my last group session.

The clock on the wall showed that the group session was half over. Dr. Collins had grown accustomed to my silence over the past few days. His habit of asking at the last minute whether I had anything to say had dwindled until, the previous day, he hadn’t bothered asking at all.

It therefore came as a surprise when his gaze swung toward me with so much of the session remaining.

“What?” I asked defensively.

He cleared his throat. “I thought, with this being your last session, you might want to contribute.”

I looked around the circle. I’d listened to most of these people describe the shitty things that had happened to them, and I’d genuinely empathized.

Laura had spoken about how her parents’ lack of interest had prompted her to act out for attention during her teenage years, behavior that evolved into a dependence on party drugs. Elise had described the abusive relationship she’d found herself trapped in for five years, and how the damage to her self-esteem lingered even after she escaped, eventually leading her to drink a bottle of vodka a day just to face people. Rafael had told us about a traumatic back injury and the subsequent addiction to painkillers he’d never managed to shake.

I opened my mouth, ready to offer my usual claim that I had nothing to say. Except deep down, I knew that was a lie. How could everyone else in the room be braver than me? I’d never considered myself a coward, but the evidence said I was. If I couldn’t speak in a room full of people carrying their own trauma—people who understood to some degree—then where could I?

I certainly hadn’t spoken to Tyler about any of it beyond what he already knew. Or Remy, no matter how often he’d said he was there to listen. That had presumably been before he started fucking Tyler.

“Rowan?”

Dr. Collins’ voice was soft. When I lifted my head, I found only empathy in his expression.

“It’s a long story,” I said, my instinct to avoid the subject in direct conflict with the urge to let it out.

“We have time. We have the rest of the session.”

Thirty minutes. It felt like both a lifetime and no time at all.

Laura reached over and squeezed my knee encouragingly. I would never see most of these people again, except for possibly her, so what did it matter what they thought?

“I don’t know where to start,” I admitted.

“At the beginning. In the middle. At the end,” Dr. Collins said patiently. “There’s no designated order, and this isn’t about us understanding. It’s about you.”

I nodded slowly. He made it sound so simple.

“My childhood wasn’t easy.” Such a fucking cliché. “People looking in from the outside would probably think it was because we had money. A lot,” I admitted. “But money isn’t everything. My parents weren’t happy together, and they argued constantly. Nothing physical. Just words.”

I rubbed my palms against my thighs. “My father never had much time for me, so when they finally split when I was ten, it seemed obvious I’d live with my mother. Except…” Bitterness sharpened my words. “My father wasn’t the sort of man who could stand to be seen losing anything. The custody battle went on for a couple of years. For most of that time, I saw my mum only at weekends and alternating school holidays.”

“That sucks,” someone said.

I didn’t know who, because I was staring at my knees. This wasn’t even the tough part. It was merely the background required to frame everything else. “Anyway, a couple of weeks after my twelfth birthday, it finally got sorted. In retrospect, it’s amazing, given how much moral standing my father possesses, that he couldn’t convince the courts to give him full custody. I guess it helped that he traveled a lot, so he couldn’t prove that he had the time or the inclination to look after a child.”

I took a slow breath. “The fight seemed to go out of him once he’d dragged the whole thing out unnecessarily. They had joint custody, but I only spent a few weeks each year at my father’s house. I could tolerate that, knowing I’d get to go home afterward. My mum was everything my father wasn’t. She loved to joke, and she took pleasure in the little things in life, like learning the name of a butterfly she’d never seen before or standing outside in the rain on a summer’s day.”

I paused to gulp water from the polystyrene cup. “I’m only telling you this so you understand we were close. Not that we didn’t argue, because we did. Everyone argues, though, right?”