"Amelia?"

Her eyes shot up from where she'd been staring at the carpet. The voice belonged to Dr. Foster, her therapist whom she hadn't seen in a few years and had hoped she'd never need to see again.

But between the bursting into tears in front of Henry on Sunday and the bizarre intrusive thoughts she'd been having this week—the idea to let her head sink below the water in the bathtub, to purposefully draw blood when she picked up her razor to shave—it was pretty obvious to her that she needed to talk to someone before this got even more out of hand. So here she was, sitting in a waiting room she hadn't sat in for ages after taking a last-minute appointment opening that Dr. Foster had.

"Hi," she said somewhat shyly as she stood up and followed Dr. Foster back to her office.

Dr. Foster was a nice woman and great at what she did, but part of what made her an effective therapist for Amelia was that she was willing to speak the truth to her not-so-gently if that's how she needed to hear it. So while she had come here specifically seeking her expertise, she was nervous, knowing that she had a painful hour ahead of her. Even if she decided to be the gentlest person on the planet today, talking about this out loud was bound to make Amelia feel like she was ripping her own heart out.

At least therapists always had tissues on hand.

She was ushered through the door of the office, a small room decorated with a slightly excessive number of salt lamps but very comfy chairs. She sat down in one of them and Dr. Foster asked her how she was doing.

Amelia knew that the clock was already ticking, so she was straightforward. "Not great. I broke up with my boyfriend on Friday."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Dr. Foster jotted something down on her notepad. "Would you be comfortable telling me a little bit about that relationship?"

She didn't want to relive any of it, of course, but Amelia had obviously known that the question was coming. Dr. Foster wasn't going to be able to help her without any context. "I, um, I met him last December..."

As she started recounting things out loud, she began to wonder if this was more so for her own benefit than her therapist's. It was bizarre to speak about her life this way, listing off what happened as if it was just a series of plot points in a book. For a second, she was almost able to forget that she'd lived and breathed all of it. But when she looked at it from this distance, the dozens of red flags she should have noticed from the get-go also seemed painfully obvious.

She got to the part where she had to admit that he'd sometimes hit her.

"Is that why you broke up with him?" Dr. Foster asked quietly. "Because he hit you?"

Amelia's shame hit her like a bout of nausea, small for a second and then overwhelming her the next.

"No," she managed to say, her lips quivering. "No. I would have kept putting up with it if it weren't for–"

She hadn't expected the conversation to reach this point this quickly. Her fingers were threaded together, gripping herself so tightly that it was starting to ache. Dr. Foster was waiting patiently.

"I left him on Friday night because he was going to–" Amelia swallowed the hot saliva in her mouth, feeling sick, unsure if she felt more so like she was going to vomit or stop breathing. She couldn't bring herself to spit the correct word out. "He was going to...assault me."

She'd been too queasy to notice the tears that had welled up in her eyes, but they washed down her cheeks in rivulets now, unceasing. She hated crying in front of other people and she really hated the thought of crying where strangers might hear her, but Amelia felt physically incapable of putting an end to it. Dr. Foster's expression had softened into one of pure and utter sympathy as she passed over the foreseen box of tissues.

"We can take as much time as you need."

Amelia nodded, but the cynical piece of her brain reminded her that she didn't want to pay all of this money just to cry for forty-five minutes and then leave.

"I want to keep going," she mumbled.

Dr. Foster nodded, consenting to her request. "Is there anyone you feel like you can talk to about this?"

"Not really," Amelia sniffed, rubbing at her eyes. "I mean—my friend Natasha, she probably has the best idea of what's going on. She helped me get my stuff out of his apartment. But she doesn't know, the um, the specifics. My parents really liked him, so I don't know how to even begin explaining..."

"You don't have to explain everything right away," Dr. Foster reassured her. "You've barely had the time to start processing it yourself. It's healthy to be drawing some boundaries for yourself right now—what's important to me is that you have a support system you can go to when you're ready."

Amelia nodded. "Yeah, um, I do. Nat's a great friend."

"Good. Now, I don't want to force you to dwell too much on this component right now, but I do feel like it's my ethical responsibility to ask: from what you've said, my understanding is that you've just removed yourself from an abusive situation. I'm proud of you for doing that."

Abuse felt like such a heavy word, but that was exactly what it was, wasn't it? He was hurting her. There was a pattern of him hurting her.

"Thank you," she said hoarsely.

"I believe you should be proud of yourself, too. You've done a very brave thing, and I mean that genuinely. But as I was saying, given the gravity of the situation, I feel as though it's my duty to remind you to consider if you want to take any legal action or not."

"No," Amelia blurted. "I—no. I don't want anything to do with the police, not when he's one of them. I just want to be able to move on with my life without thinking about him every second of every day–"

She hiccuped, air getting trapped in her throat as she tried to breathe in and cry out at the same time. She should have brought some water with her, something to stop her throat from feeling like it had closed up, but all she could do now was try to slow down and breathe through it.

"Okay," Dr. Foster said gingerly. "That's okay. There's not a wrong decision here, Amelia; I just want to make sure you have whatever tools you need to start healing from this. I have some other resources I can give you that might be useful—anonymous text lines, those sorts of things. Ways you can talk to someone who's knowledgeable in this area outside of your sessions with me. I can send you home with a list of those if you'd like."

She nodded, dabbing at her wet cheeks with a clean tissue. "What am I supposed to tell my parents before I'm ready to talk about it?"

"I'm not sure that there's one right answer to that, either. It can be difficult when your parents become attached to your significant other, but at the end of the day, it's not their place to try to dictate your relationships with other people. Even if they're coming from a good place, I certainly don't want you to be in a position where you feel like they're casting any blame on you. That will only make it more difficult for you to reframe your own thinking and move forward."

"And if they keep pushing me about it?" she questioned, knowing that it was a very real possibility. "What if I ask them to stop and they just won't?"

"I hope it doesn't come to that," Dr. Foster replied thoughtfully. "But if it does, I'd remind you that how firmly you set your boundaries with them is up to you. I know that as their daughter it might feel wrong to speak to them less often than you currently do, but sometimes we do just have to take a step back from certain people at certain stages in our life. You could say something like, 'Mom and Dad, Colton treated me very poorly and I'm trying to heal and move forward from that, and if you cannot respect my wishes to not talk about him right now then I will need to communicate less with you for the time being.'"

The thought of cutting her parents out of her life, however temporarily, felt...weird. But Amelia grasped that she needed to take care of herself first and foremost right now without worrying about their opinions, and she knew that Dr. Foster was correct about the fact that the negativity was going to get to her if she heard too much of it. Hopefully, her parents would just stay quiet about him and this wouldn't be a bridge she had to cross.

Her eyes floated to the clock. They had a bit of time left in their session, but she wasn't sure how much more Colton talk she could handle right now.

"Could we, um. Could we talk about something else?" she asked sheepishly.

"Of course. Is there something else specific you'd like to talk about?"

It would have felt somehow dishonest to come in here and not touch on the other giant metaphorical elephant in the metaphorical room that was her life right now. So she tried to explain about Lily Myers, about Henry, about Liam. How it was horrible and yet talking to Henry was one of the few things bringing her comfort right now; how there was a piece of her that wanted to run to him and spill the whole truth because she knew he would have the right thing to say to her, yet she felt guilty talking about how her life was hard while his was so much harder; how she wanted to somehow be the hero that could get to the bottom of this for them and yet she felt utterly helpless to do anything when she could barely even keep herself afloat right now.

"From what you're describing, it sounds like this Henry might be open to having an honest discussion about how you're feeling, if you'd be comfortable doing that. If he's putting any pressure on you to behave a certain way, I think it's worth communicating that you're struggling with your own things right now."

"That's the thing—he's not pressuring me. I don't think he's expecting anything specific of me. I guess I'm just pressuring myself. I guess I feel stupid about not having all the answers and just giving him this extra emotional baggage to deal with. And I get scared sometimes that he's actually annoyed with me but being too polite to admit it."

"No one ever has all of the answers," Dr. Foster reminded her. "I'm getting the impression that you feel like you're hurting him more than you're helping, but I don't think that necessarily has to be true. Have you ever heard that saying 'misery loves company?' There's a lot of truth to it, I think. You might feel like you're burdening him by sharing about your own experiences, but a lot of people actually get some comfort out of knowing that they're not alone in their sadness."

Amelia was quiet. It hadn't exactly crossed her mind that her being a mess right now might actually make him feel better. But then again, wasn't that part of what kept drawing her back to him over and over again? The understanding that he wasn't going to judge her for feeling like her world was crumbling apart because his was too?

"If you feel up to it, I think it would be worth trying to have a more transparent conversation with him about how this is making both of you feel," Dr. Foster added. "We can't read minds, unfortunately, so there's not a sure way to know what's going on in someone else's head without asking, but it sounds like you care a lot about this friendship with Henry and I don't want a lack of communication to allow it to become something that's hurting you both. If either of you expresses that talking to the other is becoming stressful, I hope you would both respect that and act accordingly."

"I think...I know he'd respect that, yeah. And I'd honestly be sad if he needed me to back off, but I would understand."

"I think you would as well. You have good instincts, Amelia—trust them."

For the first time in this entire session, her lips tugged upward just a tiny bit. "Thank you."

While Dr. Foster briefly left the room to print off that resource sheet for her, Amelia dabbed at her cheeks with a tissue one last time to make herself look as presentable as possible before she emerged back into the world. Though she knew that the smart thing to do would probably be to let herself relax for the rest of the evening and process how she felt about this appointment, she was itching to call Henry.

The sun was noticeably lower in the sky when she left the office than it'd been when she went in. She'd gotten so accustomed to the long summer days, those afternoons that felt like they stretched on into eternity before the stubborn sky finally darkened, that it almost felt odd now for the sun to already be setting at dinnertime. Yet she'd always enjoyed autumn more than the heat of June, and she savored the satisfying crunch of leaves underfoot as she walked to her car, the crispness in the air.

She retrieved her phone from her purse once she'd tossed it into the passenger seat and closed the car door behind her. A stupid little smile formed on her lips; there was already a text from Henry waiting for her. It looked like he'd sent it about half an hour ago.

How are you feeling?

Well I actually just got out of therapy lol. I'm feeling ok, just hanging in there. How about you?

Henry is typing...

Yeah, hanging in there. I was gonna ask if you wanted to come to dinner on Friday

I'll be there

She thought about putting her phone away for now, but her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She kept typing after a moment of deliberation.

Is there any chance I could call you? Or are you busy

Not busy, what's up?

So Amelia clicked on the call button, the ringing lasting only for a second before he answered.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey," he said back, and there was a bizarre, tightening sensation in her chest that wasn't entirely unpleasant. "You okay?"

She wouldn't admit to herself that she could have said this all over a text message, that a part of her had asked to call him because she just wanted to hear his voice. That was a crazy thought, so she ignored it.

"Yeah," she answered. She doubted that it was very true, but it didn't feel like a lie, either. For the first time in a while, she at least felt like she was heading in the right direction, and that in itself made her feel a little hopeful, a little freer.

"I just wanted to talk to you. I realized that I've been feeling guilty about telling you about all of this stuff I'm going through when you already have so much on your plate. And I—well, it occurred to me that I don't really know how you feel about it. You've been so nice to me about everything, but I wasn't sure if you were just trying to be polite about it. You don't have to keep doing it if that's what you're doing."

Henry was silent for a moment, but the faint white noise coming from his end of the call told her that he was still there.

"I...yeah, I feel the same way, actually," he eventually replied. "I get nervous sometimes that I might be making you more upset."

A small, relieved laugh tumbled off of her lips. "I'm not laughing at you," she apologized quickly. "That's, um, that's just a big relief to hear..."

She slowly took in a breath, then added more tenderly, "I really do care about you, Henry. That's why I got anxious that I was accidentally overwhelming you when what I really wanted was–"

She swallowed, second-guessing herself.

"Was what?" he quietly nudged her when she didn't finish her sentence.

"To comfort you."

"You do comfort me," he told her softly. "You don't have to worry about that."

"Okay," she breathed. She thought that some of the shakiness had returned to her voice, but she might have been imagining things. Her brain was very, very tired and she didn't know what to say next. "Okay, cool. I'll, um, I'll see you on Friday then."

"See you on Friday," he echoed. "G—Wait, I was about to say goodnight, but it's only like six o'clock, isn't it?"

Amelia laughed. "Maybe you just gave me an excuse to go to bed at six. Goodnight, Henry."

"Maybe I will, too." He sounded like he was smiling. "Goodnight, Amelia."

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A/N:

i am obviously just an author typing away on her silly little keyboard and not a counselor so please don't take that conversation as indicative of what therapy is like irl