Free In the Blood by Lisa Unger

gone, I turned to look at Ainsley, who was watching me strangely.
    “What?” I asked.
    “Nothing,” she said. And then she started to cry. I should have moved over to her and held on tight. I could have stroked her hair, telling her that it was all right, a big nothing. Beck would be home by dinner, I could have said. Ainsley was my friend, and it would have been right for me to comfort her. It was the expected thing. But I didn’t do that. I moved away from her instead, and she wrapped her arms around herself. I stood awkwardly for a moment.
    “Don’t worry about it, okay,” I said as I moved toward my bedroom. “She’s fine.”
    I saw her nod, but she didn’t say anything.

    I saw a shrink in town, Dr. Maggie Cooper, and I had been seeing her my entire time at school. I had sessions once a week, sometimesevery other week. It depended largely on the time of year, how heavy was the burden of my past in any given season, if I was especially stressed or sad.
    I think it would be safe to say that Dr. Cooper knew me better than almost anyone alive who was not related to me, and even she didn’t know everything. But I liked her and trusted her, had never felt safer or less judged than I did on the couch in her office. Luckily, I had an appointment that afternoon.
    I told her about the things Beck had said—about Luke, about Langdon. And how I had left Beck in the library, both of us angry. And how Beck hadn’t come home. Dr. Cooper listened in that careful way she had, nodding, issuing affirming noises. In her office, the real world always seemed so distant and far away, infinitely manageable. I could sink into the plush couch, hug one of the overstuffed throw pillows to my middle, and just be, while everything waited swirling and chaotic outside her door.
    “I’m so sorry to hear this, Lana. It must be so frightening for you,” said Dr. Cooper. She reached over and handed me a box of tissues, even though I wasn’t crying.
    “A missing girl is always cause for alarm,” she went on. “But it’s important for you not to get catastrophic in your thinking. It could yet be a false alarm. The police are reacting quickly, which is as it should be. But, for you personally, try not to imagine the worst-case scenario.”
    “But her bag,” I said. That was really the thing that got to me. “She’d never leave that anywhere, not for any reason.”
    Dr. Cooper made an affirming noise. “That is troubling, I admit.”
    It wasn’t possible for me not to get catastrophic in my thinking, not to imagine the worst-case scenario. I told her as much.
    “It’s a process,” she said. “To change the way we think. And you have unique challenges. But it is possible.”
    The good doctor was so far out of her depth, she didn’t even know. Like a weak swimmer congratulating herself for treading water while a school of sharks circled her below the surface.
    “I’ll work on it,” I said.
    She gave me a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. I’d noticed a change in Dr. Cooper the last couple of sessions. Was it that some of her warmth had faded? Or was she holding something back, or sensing that I was? I tried to think back, wondered if I’d said anything I shouldn’t have. It was true that I was getting very comfortable here, had even started to look forward to the sessions that I had agreed to initially only to appease my aunt. You have to talk to someone regularly about the things you’re dealing with. You need someone to help you narrate the past in a healthy way. She was a big believer in talk therapy. She was also the joint manager with Sky of my trust. Not that she ever used it to manipulate me, but it always just seemed like a good idea to do what she wanted.
    Then, to have a place to talk about some (not all) of the things that haunted me, that leaked into my dreams, that kept me feeling distant and separate from the world that went on around me, had actually been a big relief. The doctor had never once seemed