“I’m good,” I answer as I fold my hands together, stopping myself from fidgeting. I always hate this part. The niceties of how my week was, before getting into the real reasons of why I come here once a week. Insecurity eats away at me as the sadness attempts to consume my thoughts. I started seeing Dr. Kendal Elliot when I didn’t even want to get out of bed. I didn’t understand why I was so upset, why I kept pushing everyone away. My family didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to help me grieve. It wasn’t until I had a visit from Nix that I realized I wasn’t coping. The badass biker telling me I needed to pull my head out of my ass was enough to get me up and moving. I stood there and cried for what I had become. He held me while the waves of emotion washed over me, and then pulled out his phone and made my first appointment.

“Want to start with a page from your book?” Dr. Elliot smiles, returning me to the present moment. She knows how much I hate this part. I’ve tried all my tricks to get out of it, leaving my notebook at home and begging her to read it out for me. I hate the anticipation of it, of listening to the words pour out of me when I’m feeling most vulnerable.

“Sure,” I reply, knowing the quicker this is done, the quicker we can move on. Taking a deep breath, I flip to my most recent entry in the diary I’ve been keeping for the last few weeks.

“I didn’t really get much down,” I lie. This journal is filled with so much shit, I just hate repeating it.

“That’s okay. Let’s hear what you have,” she counters. If I weren’t about to let her into my darkness, I would smile at her persistence.

“Tuesday the second. Today has been a bad day. I’m sick of feeling so weak. Why can’t I just feel peace? Why does it have to be so hard?” I read aloud in a shaky voice, scanning the pages filled with my scrawled handwriting. “I don’t want to feel like this, like I’m in a constant state of anguish. Why can’t I just pick myself up? I know I’m playing the victim card, but I can’t stop. I hate that about me. I hate how this controls me. That I can’t just wake up and be okay.” I begin to cry through my words, resenting every moment of it. My innermost thoughts spew out of me, holding me together, but at the same time, they possess the strength to break me.

“Very good, Holly.” She smiles her gentle smile. “Can you tell me why you think you have a hard time reading your diary back to me?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes, when I start going down the path of feeling sorry for myself, I can’t stop. It’s like I work so hard trying to feel okay, but then I do this and feel worse.” I shrug, not really understanding why I have to relive it over and over.

“Well, that’s the purpose of these exercises. You’re not playing the victim, Holly. You are a victim. Getting these feelings out is normal. You’re not going to break. It’s okay to feel those things. They are a normal reaction to what you have experienced.”

“But is it? Shouldn’t I be over this by now? I feel like I need to just get over it, get over this pain, this loss, but I can’t and it’s messing with my head.” I let out a shaky breath. This panic consumes me. It takes everyday things and makes them impossible to endure. When will it all be okay?

“Holly, you experienced something that was life threatening. You were shot. The same bullet killed your child. That is what happened to you. That won’t ever leave you, so it’s okay to be feeling these emotions. It doesn’t make you weak, or helpless. You had something taken from you. You need to stop worrying about how other people expect you to act, or be. There is no shame in feeling like you can’t handle the stress of what you went through. There is no shame in wanting to curl up in your bed and feel like you don’t want to face the world. What’s not okay is hiding these feelings. If you don’t talk about what you’re trying to bury, then you aren’t going to work through this and move forward with your life.” I know what she is saying is right, but how do you try to explain to someone who doesn’t understand what you are going through? I don’t want to bring down my friends or my family.

“I just wish this feeling of dread would go away. That it wasn’t so hard to roll out of bed.”

“You need more time and you need to let people in. I think you need to tell Sy about the baby,” she insists and I know she is right. I know telling Sy is something that needs to be done. How do I even begin to explain my mourning for the loss of someone whose existence was kept secret in the first place?

“I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

“What are you so afraid of?” she asks, eyeing me carefully. This is something we have discussed many times in the last few weeks, but I don’t know what is holding me back from telling him. It’s not that I’m afraid of him, but more of what he will say.

“That he will look at it as something that was insignificant and dismiss my loss.” I let the truth come out with no hesitation. It frightens me more than anything else.

“Do you honestly believe that?” She sounds shocked, but she doesn’t know the situation like I do. He might be in my space now, but before the shooting, the man didn’t want anything to do with me.

“I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

“That’s what we have to work on, Holly, getting you to believe again.”

***

“So, he just followed you to work, spent all day at the front of the store, and then followed you home. You both ate in silence, then he left?” Kadence asks, sitting across from me in our favorite coffee shop a week after Sy’s weird stalker day. I don’t know why I even let on about my strange night with Sy, but he never told me why the club was watching out, so I wanted to know what was going on. I haven’t seen anyone else watching me, so what game is he playing?