Page 59

February 12, Dallas, Texas.

After a long day of driving, Dani and I stopped in Dallas for the night. Tomorrow, I would see my brother for the first time in ten years. I wasn’t sure I was ready. I didn’t know if I would ever be ready.

When my phone rang and I looked at the caller ID, a wide smile spread across my face. Answering the call, I snarked, “Hey, bitch, where the hell have you been?”

“I’m sorry,” Haizley said.

I missed my friend. We didn’t talk nearly often enough. “The last few days have been a shit show. I broke the cardinal rule.”

“You slept with a patient?” I gasped, shocked at my friend’s confession. Haizley was a rule follower. She did everything by the book. The idea that she would sleep with a patient was too absurd to believe.

The chuckle that came across the line had me confused.

“Technically, yes. But not like you’re thinking. I have a patient who was drugged and raped. The first two nights out of the hospital, I slept in her bed with her. She was such a mess. The third night, she slept alone, but I didn’t get much sleep with the nightmares she kept having.”

“Oh gosh, Haiz. I feel awful for her.”

Rape was an atrocious crime. In my opinion, worse than murder. Death was a reward compared to what someone who had been raped was left to live with.

As awful as it may sound, I was thankful Dani’s mother no longer had to live with what was forced upon her. Dante, however, would live with guilt and shame for the rest of his life. Despite my best efforts to help him, I wasn’t trained in that kind of trauma. I could only hope that when they came home he would reach out to Haizley.

“It gets worse.”

“How?” I asked cautiously.

“UGH! Missy, I screwed up,” she confessed.

“What happened?”

“There is this guy.”

“You have a guy? Haizley Pearl Walker, why am I just now hearing about this?”

“Because I don’t really have a guy. He’s just—God, he’s an asshole. But he showed up outside my patient’s house. She was taking a nap, so I slipped out to tear him a new asshole for tracking me down after I told him I was fine. And before I could yell at him, he pulled me to him and kissed me. And oh God, Missy, can this man kiss!”

“So, what’s the problem?”

Haizley wasn’t one for dramatics usually. That was my personality. I was great at showing my patients my professional side, but outside the office, I was what one might call a drama llama.

I often took everything to heart. Like when I saw Travis’ motorcycle. Gosh, with everything going on I hadn’t thought about him in weeks.

Until now. I closed my eyes, waiting for Haizley to continue and distract me from the man who wrecked me.

Haizley’s deep breath could be heard through the phone as she explained, “The guy who drugged and raped my patient must have been stalking her. Four days after getting out of the hospital, he attacked her in her home. Right after I went outside.”

“Oh, Haiz. That isn’t your fault. You know he would have found a way to get to her. What did he do?”

“Thankfully not much. We heard her scream, and the guy I was outside with ran in and kicked the door down. Scaring the man off.”

“Oh my God, that’s hot.”

“It really was.” She sighed. “But now we are staying somewhere else. And it’s getting difficult. She doesn’t want to leave here. She feels safe, and she is. But I have been with her every moment since she left the hospital.”

“And you are worried about transference.”

I looked over at Dani and I understood Haizley’s concerns immediately. Transference was an issue when working with patients who had significant trauma. Like little girls who had been left by everyone who was supposed to love them.

“Yea.”