Eternal by V. Forrest (new reading TXT) 📗

to be a place where a patient could pretend she was at home and in a comfort zone where she felt free to speak. To feel. Fia wondered if she was alone among Kettleman’s patients in thinking she was far more comfortable in this lounge than in any living room her family possessed.

Dr. Kettleman waited for Fia to begin the conversation. It was an annoying but effective technique. The scent of her Chanel perfume drifted.

Fia studied the psychiatrist for a moment. She was dark-haired with a conservative shoulder-length bob and a structured gray suit. Wire-frame glasses in a world where most people wore contacts. She reminded Fia a little of Tony’s psychiatrist on The Sopranos, enough so that she wondered if Kettleman had done it purposefully.

Fia was an HBO fan. She appreciated the stark reality, the irony, the dry humor.

“If you’d have asked me a week ago, I would have told you there wasn’t a chance I would fall off the wagon,” Fia heard herself say. “I’ve been doing so well. It’s been months…”

“And how did it make you feel,” the psychiatrist asked, watching Fia. “This fall.”

Fia thought for a moment. The office was overly warm and she considered removing her jacket, but the psychiatrist was also wearing a suit jacket and she didn’t seem to be hot. “I felt like a failure, of course,” she said. “The loser my father always knew I could be.”

“Pretty harsh judgment,” Kettleman observed.

Fia studied the woman’s eyebrows. She had nicely shaped brows. Fia wondered if she had them waxed.

“Do you feel this was a minor setback, Fia, or are you falling back into your dependence?”

Fia thought about the tangy, sharp taste of the suit’s blood, the incredible rush it had given her. She suspected his blood was as intoxicating to her as any recreational drug on the market. “I’m not going to fall back into my old habits, if that’s what you’re asking,” she told the psychiatrist. “I’ve worked too hard to get where I am to take the chance of losing it all.” She sat back on the caramel-colored leather couch. “This is a minor setback. Nothing more.”

Dr. Kettleman was silent again. It was the silences that could kill a woman. Make her want to kill herself.

Suicide? Fia almost laughed aloud at the irony of it. If God had given the Kahill sept the option, wouldn’t they all have killed themselves a thousand years ago? It was one of the conventions of the mallachd that made it so cruel. Not only was it nearly impossible for a human to end a sept member’s life, but they could not end their own. On good days, Fia knew it was also a blessing from God.

“Tell me about the other night. What happened with Joseph?” Kettleman asked in her passive psychiatrist’s voice.

“I told you. He called. I met him. We had a drink and I left.”

“What did he want?”

Fia’s gaze drifted to the wall of diplomas behind the woman’s head. Undergraduate degree from Temple University. Medical degree from Johns Hopkins. The woman was no slouch.

“I don’t know what he wanted,” Fia said, her own reflection in the glass over one of the diplomas making her uncomfortable. She needed a haircut. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was losing that razor-cut edge she liked. “I didn’t hang around long enough to ask.”

“So you drove to New Jersey to meet your ex-boyfriend you haven’t seen in fifteen years and you didn’t stay long enough to ask why he called you?”

Fia had to admit it sounded ridiculous when put that way, but obviously she had issues, otherwise she wouldn’t be paying for twice-monthly hour-long sessions with a shrink, would she?

“It was harder than I thought it would be,” Fia said softly.

“What was?”

“Seeing him.” Fia was surprised by the emotion that caught in her throat. She picked at the shell button of her Ralph Lauren linen suit jacket. “Hearing his voice again.”

“Do you still love him?”

Fia looked up. “Of course not.”

“Because…”

“Because…” She looked down at the button between her fingers. “Because we were bad together. He was…it wasn’t a healthy relationship.”

“And yet after all these years, he calls you and you still come running.”

Fia frowned. “I’m not finding any of your comments today particularly helpful. You know I come here to feel better. To get you to help me figure out how to live day to day with who I am.”

“How have the last six months been?” Dr. Kettleman crossed her legs. She had nice gams. “Just in general.”

“Not bad. Pretty good,” Fia conceded. “At least until I was sent to my hometown to investigate a murder. Until someone I knew turned up decapitated and two exes came back from the dead to haunt me. All in one week, I might add.”

For the first time since Fia arrived today, Dr. Kettleman smiled. “I don’t think you really need my help, Fia. You know your own weaknesses; the substance abuse, the sexual addiction. You know which relationships you have that are toxic. The past relationship with Joseph. The present relationship with your parents.”

Silence stretched between them again. Dr. Kettleman waited. Fia sifted through her thoughts. Her emotions.

“For months, I’ve felt so in control,” Fia said hesitantly. “And then I go back to Clare Point and suddenly nothing is what it was. I’m not what I thought I was.”

Again, Dr. Kettleman smiled. “Life changes and we have to change with it. You have to accept that not even you, Special Agent Fia Kahill, are immune to loss, to death, to the innate need to be loved.”

Fia released the button on her suit. “All my training and I have no clue where to find Bobby’s killer. No thought even where to begin.” She knew she was hopping around, subject to subject, but her sessions with Dr. Kettleman often went this way. It took days, sometimes weeks after an appointment for Fia to sort out everything they discussed.

“You said the FBI sent a Baltimore FBI agent in because it was their jurisdiction. You said he