by Jane Blythe
Again, he’d been wrong.
It seemed he wasn't as good at reading his ex-wife as he hoped he would be.
Why had he kissed her? He was pretty sure it was a mistake and only going to grow the gap between them, not close it. She hadn’t even kissed him back. He’d thought that meant she wasn't interested in seeing if they could work things out, but then she’d told him she’d used his nickname for her store because it reminded her of him, of how happy they had been, of their lives before that night.
There was hope. He knew there was. But they had to sit down and actually talk without it devolving into an argument. And he had to stop telling her it was just a job when he knew that was a bold-faced lie.
It wasn't just a job.
Hannah could never be just a job to him.
Trying to forget about her over the last three years had been a pointless waste of time. He could never forget her. He loved her. She and she alone laid claim to his heart.
Now, his sole focus had to be on solving this case. Once that was done, he and Hannah could find a way to work things out.
The door to the office opened, and both he and Chloe stood. A man of around forty, with bright orangey-red hair, striking blue eyes, and so many freckles it was almost impossible to see any space between them, looked back at them.
“You’re the agents who called?” Dr. Bryce McCracken asked.
“Yes. Special Agent Drake, and this is my partner, Special Agent Luckman.” Tom made the introductions, eager to get started. Just because Hannah said that her therapist didn't try to create a situation where she would be forced to confront her fears didn't mean he hadn’t done it without her knowledge.
“Come in, I have about thirty minutes until my next patient arrives for their session,” the doctor told them as they followed him into his office.
Bryce was fairly recently divorced, and his ex-wife bore a striking resemblance to Hannah. Tom was concerned that since he had lost his marriage that he had fixated on Hannah in an attempt to save her and then possibly pursue her romantically. “You work primarily with victims of trauma, treating post-traumatic stress disorder and related conditions?”
“Yes, that’s what I've spent most of my career doing.” Bryce nodded.
“Why don’t you tell us a little about your methods,” Tom suggested. He wanted to get an understanding of exactly what this man did with his patients.
“Okay. Well most sufferers of PTSD struggle to deal with the emotions surrounding the traumatic event that they suffered because those emotions are just so understandingly overwhelming. Because those feelings are so negative and so difficult to cope with, PTSD sufferers can often hamper their own recovery by avoiding anything and everything that reminds them of the trauma. It might be a strategy that helps them to function day to day, but it also limits their processing of the event and thus limits their recovery,” Dr. McCracken summarized.
“So, what do you do to help them?” Chloe asked, looking genuinely interested.
Focusing on Chloe, the doctor explained, “I use cognitive processing therapy. I use trauma specific techniques to help victims work through what happened to them and their feelings and emotions surrounding it and help them work toward recovery.”
“One of those techniques is exposure therapy?” Tom asked.
“Yes, it is. The primary focus of what I do, or cognitive processing therapy in general, is to help the patient learn to face and understand the trauma they experienced, and the beliefs it has created in them and the emotions that it sparks, so we can decrease the ongoing negative impact it has on their life. Learning to stop avoiding those triggers is a major part of that. Avoiding doesn’t solve the problem; in fact, it makes it worse. So, we start by helping the patient to better understand PTSD symptoms and the way that treatment is going to help them. Then we want the patient to think about where they are currently, what are their understandings of why the traumatic event occurred, and the impact it’s had on them and their beliefs and feelings about themselves and the world following the trauma. Next, we work on processing the trauma. This is understandably the most difficult part, but it is necessary for the patient to learn to clarify and then modify their distortions in their views of themselves and the world that the trauma created. Once we’ve done that, we can work on helping them change those so we can improve their quality of life.”
“How does the exposure therapy fit into that?” he asked. That’s what they needed to know. Had the doctor taken that theory to the extreme and set up the robbery to try to help Hannah overcome her fears?
“Exposure therapy is based on the principle of respondent conditioning. We want to identify the thoughts, emotions, and physiological arousal that accompanies the stimuli that induces fear, then break that pattern by facing the fear rather than running and hiding from it. We usually take small steps toward the greatest fear-invoking stimuli, working through them, processing them, and making sure the patient is ready to move on to the next step. Depending on the condition, generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, or what I primarily deal with, which is PTSD, we might approach things a little differently.”
“What specifically do you do to help them learn to face their fears?” Chloe asked.
“Well, there are three types of exposure. One is confronting feared bodily symptoms, such as panic attacks with increased heart rate and shortness of breath that make the sufferer feel like they can't breathe, so we work on calming techniques and how these feelings will pass and are nothing to be feared. Another is confronting the fear of thoughts and memories, where we work on imagining a situation that they fear, and that again these thoughts and memories can be managed and are not anything to be afraid of. And the third, is real-life exposure, where we put the patient in a situation where they must confront their fear-inducing stimuli.”
That was what he wanted to know more about. “Isn't that harmful to the patient? Putting them back into a situation where they were harmed and traumatized in the first place?”
“Obviously, it’s a case-by-case situation. And obviously, I'm not going to take a sexual assault victim and put them back in a situation where they fear they are going to be raped. But we can work on things such as returning to the location or type of location where the assault occurred, so they no longer fear that place. Or we can work on issues such as regaining intimacy with their significant other that might have been compromised by the assault.”
“From what we heard, you like to put your patients in the most dangerous of situations you can to help them overcome their fears,” Tom said, watching for the doctor’s reaction.
“I have a good success rate,” Bryce said evenly.
“One of your patients is Hannah Buffy?”
“Yes. Is this about the robbery at her store?”
“You heard about that?” Tom asked.
“Hannah called me the following morning and asked if we could make an appointment. I have her booked to come in on December twenty-ninth.”
“Did you set up the robbery?” he confronted the doctor with their suspicions.
Bryce’s eyes grew wide. “Of course not. I would never set up a dangerous situation as a form of therapy without the patient’s consent, otherwise it’s just going to do more harm than good. In Hannah’s case, given her fear of guns, having her held at gunpoint when she wasn't prepared to come face-to-face with a weapon would be extremely counterproductive.” The doctor paused and eyed him shrewdly. “I know who you are. You're Hannah’s ex-husband.”
“You know about me?”
“Of course. I've been seeing Hannah for close to three years now. I know about the home invasion, and I know about what it did to your marriage.” The doctor’s face now turned sympathetic.
“Did Hannah talk about me? About us?” Tom wanted someone to tell him that Hannah still loved him, and that they could fix the problems in their relationship the assault had caused.
“You know that’s privileged. I told you about the gun phobia beca
use I know you already knew about it, given your relationship with her, but don’t forget I'm Hannah’s doctor, I can't tell you what we spoke about. Hannah is a very special woman, strong and resilient, and I want to see her happy. I want to see her succeed in life. I would never do anything that would prevent that from happening. And pretending to rob her store just to make her confront her fear of guns would hamper her recovery, and thus stop her from being happy.”
Looking into Dr. Bryce McCracken’s earnest face, Tom couldn’t decide if he was simply a dedicated doctor wanting to help his patients however he could. Or someone who’d gone beyond the realm of the doctor-patient relationship and developed an obsession with Hannah that ran so deep he would do whatever it took to save her and make her his very own.
* * * * *
10:17 P.M.
She couldn’t move.
There were so many hands on her, holding her down.
She tried to fight against them, but there were too many.
And they were so strong.
She was never getting away.
Hannah knew she was going to die here in this room, with her husband watching.
That was the worst.
As those men held her down, their fingertips digging into the flesh of her arms and her thighs as they pulled her legs apart, she couldn’t bear to look at him. She could hear his agonized groans and grunts of impotent fury as he tried to break free of his own bonds.
Every time one of the men entered her body, she could hear the chair Tom was tied to thumping and clattering against the floor as he tried to get to her.
Having accepted her fate, she scrunched her eyes shut and tried to block everything out. Tried to put herself in a place where she couldn’t feel anything.
The best she could hope for right now was a quick and painless death, but feared her death would be anything but.
She had no hope.
She knew only pain.
Hannah had no idea how long it went on.
Eventually, the pain faded and she became numb.
Then a gunshot sliced through the stillness . . .
Hannah woke with a start.
Her heart was hammering and her body was drenched in an icy sheen of sweat. She was shaking so badly she was making the chair shake with her.
Scrunching her eyes closed, she tried to breathe through her terror.
In through her nose and out through her mouth.
In through her nose and out through her mouth.
In through her nose and out through her mouth.
Eventually, she started to regain control of herself. Her breathing had slowed, as had her heart rate, she still shivered a little, but now it was more from cold as the air met her wet skin than from fear.
She had clenched her hands into fists, clutching the blanket that was draped across her, so tightly that it took a moment for her stiff fingers to uncurl. She flexed her hands, stretching her fingers out wide, then took hold of the blanket again and pulled it up to her chin.
Hannah glanced at the clock on the small table beside her armchair. It wasn't even eleven o’clock yet. It was going to be a long night. A very long night.
She eyed her bed. Should she go and lie down, make herself more comfortable and see if that helped her go back to sleep? She hadn’t spent a full night sleeping in a bed since the night before the home invasion. She had spent months working on the issue with both Dr. Langley and Dr. McCracken, but she couldn’t seem to overcome the fear.
Some nights she would start in the bed, but she always had nightmares and lasted no more than a couple of hours before she woke in a panic. When that happened, she would give up and move to the armchair in the corner of her bedroom. Most nights she didn't even bother attempting the bed.
It was one thing for Dr. McCracken to say that her nightmares couldn’t hurt her, that her bed was only an object, that nothing bad was going to happen if she slept in it, but he wasn't the one who felt the fear. She knew that the nightmares couldn’t hurt her physically, but they certainly hurt her psychologically. And on the nights when she tried the bed, she always—without fail—had bad dreams. Then she was afraid to close her eyes for the rest of the night, so she didn't sleep. Then she walked around the rest of the day in a fog.
If it was up to her, she probably wouldn’t even bother to keep the bed. She never saw herself spending an entire night in one again, but it was easier to have it there in case friends or family happened to come up to her bedroom. It saved a lot of questions. Dr. Langley, Dr. McCracken, Garry, and Tom were the only ones who knew that she usually slept in a chair.
Tom.
He seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her head.
She couldn’t not think about him.
At the moment, that kiss was at the forefront of her mind. When his lips met hers, it took her back to the past. To how happy she had been with him, how happy they had been together. At how excited she had been to share her future with him and of all the things they had to look forward to together. Of the deep, passionate, all-consuming love she’d had for him.
That love was still there.
It hadn’t gone; it had only been overshadowed by the trauma they had shared.
They had turned their backs on each other, right when they needed each other the most. She couldn’t blame Tom for leaving. He wasn't altogether wrong when he accused her of pushing him away. It hadn’t been intentional, though. Hannah had wanted him there by her side, but not to cosset and protect her, just to encourage and support her. And when he hadn’t done that, she had started insisting that he not hover at her side, that he not be with her all the time, that he let her do things for herself.
She had given him the impression that he wasn't wanted.
So, he’d left.
Tom might have been gone from her life for three years, but what she felt for him had remained.
Maybe there was a way to bring it back.
She hoped there was.
Giving up on sleep for now, Hannah stood up, tossed the blanket onto the armchair, and snuggled into her fuzzy pink robe with a teddy bear face on the hood. She headed downstairs to the kitchen, flipping on lights as she went. She’d worked hard to overcome her phobia of the dark, eventually learning not to need the light on all night every night, but after a nightmare, she reverted back to needing the light.
In the kitchen, she set about making herself a snack. She hadn’t had any dinner. Her stomach had been all tied up in knots thinking about Tom and the kiss and whether or not it meant that they might get back together or whether he just felt sorry for her.
That was her biggest fear.
To Tom, she would always be a victim. He couldn’t help but see her as one after he watched her be gang raped for almost seven hours. She understood that. She just couldn’t allow that sort of mentality to be around her. She had fought so hard to overcome the victim label, and she didn't want to go back to that place. She didn't want to be pitied. She wanted to be treated like she wasn’t helpless, and she didn't want to be treated like she was fragile and might fall apart if she was handled the wrong way.
She wanted to be treated like the strong, resilient, independent woman that she was.
If Tom couldn’t do that, then no matter how much she still loved him, they could never work things out.
And if Tom never admitted he needed help, that he needed to let go of the guilt he felt, that he needed to acknowledge that he had been a victim too, then she didn't think he could ever see her as anything other than a victim.
Right now, the ball was squarely in his court. He could keep pretending that this was just a job and that she was just a victim who needed saving, or he could recognize things for what they were and do something about it.
She really hoped he chose the latter. Because she couldn’t allow anything to interfere with her sanity. Most days it balanced precariously between survivor and victim, and it took a lot of effort and work and conscious action to keep herself firmly on the survivo
r side. And not even for Tom would she allow herself to cross back over to victim.
Hannah was just removing her bowl of oatmeal from the microwave when she heard a sound.
She froze.
Surely, she must be wrong.
But then she heard it again.
Something was definitely moving around out there.
Someone.
What should she do?
Should she hide? Should she call 911? Should she try to find a weapon and stay here and defend herself?
Her eyes scanned the kitchen and fell on the utensil drawer. Setting the bowl on the countertop, she armed herself with the biggest knife she could find. Her cell phone was still upstairs on the table beside her armchair, but there was a phone on the table over by the fireplace. She just had to get to it.
She was halfway there when she heard something bump against her door.
For a moment, she was paralyzed with fear.
This could not be happening again.
But then, she relaxed.
Tom.
It would be just like him to be patrolling her house, paranoid that if he didn't, this “monster” he believed was stalking her would show up and hurt her.
In a way, his overprotectiveness was a little endearing, but in an even bigger way, it was annoying and even insulting. How many times did she have to tell him that she didn't need to be saved?
Knife still in hand, she stalked to the door, unlocked it, and threw it open, prepared to give him a piece of her mind, but choked when she saw who was standing on her doorstep.
* * * * *
11:28 P.M.
Hannah’s house was exactly what he would have expected her to choose. Two stories, painted a fresh, bright white, a big porch, a neat and simple garden with neatly mowed lawns, and big trees that would provide lots of leafy shade in the summertime. It was exactly the type of house they had spoken about owning one day.
Only that day had never come.
As Tom watched her house from his car, he saw a light flicker on upstairs, and then a moment later, one downstairs.