Page 107 of Deadly Knight

“All without that mental protection.”

“I see where you’re going with this. A few days are different from a lifetime.”

“Are they?”

Um.

“Have you considered that you’re strong without your walls? That without them you’ve proven to yourself you are. With or without walls, you made it through. They fell because your subconscious knew Dimitri was safe and trustworthy, and you didn’t have to rebuild for the same purpose.”

This is why therapists need therapy. I’d be blind to my own faults and solutions.

“Maybe,” I whisper, reaching for her bin of fidget tools, needing one more than ever. The folding cube means my focus is on something other than Ava’s points—which are completely and unfortunately valid.

“Alright, let’s return to what you called Dimitri…” She glances at her pad. “A mobster.”

Finally, an easy answer. “He’s a Bratva soldier. A.K.A: a mobster.” Thank fuck for client confidentiality.

“Have you noticed you call Dimitri by nameexceptwhen you’re defending your choices and relate him to his job?”

“Do I?”

She nods. “Is it possible for you to separate Dimitri from his job?”

“Already have.” I fold the cube, my motions jerky. “It’s nothimI’m worried about. It’s the people who’ll come after us.”

“What if no one does? What if his father was, as Dimitri told you, lying or exaggerating?”

These are the questions that have plagued me daily, resulting in the circles I mentioned before. “Then I might have made a huge mistake and given up an amazing man.”

She sits in silence, my admittance bouncing around the quiet office, only the gentle barely-there whirling of the computer in the far corner.

“My time home proved I never got over him, even though I thought I had.”

She chuckles. “I could have told you that years ago. Did you realize you called Russia home?”

“Well, I did spend half my life there. It’s natural.”

“Eighteen years versus ten here. Not a huge difference. Isn’t that what you told Dimitri and his family to defend your return to Toronto?”

Fuck Ava for calling me out on everything.

“Maybe. I had to. They weren’t listening to me.”

“Yes…” She trails off, flipping backwards in her notes. “Because you kept telling Dimitri he needed time away from you to heal, even when he claimed he didn’t need that. Do you truly feel he should?”

She’s asking methis? “Ava, professional to professional, tell me the truth: wouldn’t he?”

Her hesitation is obvious before she rests her pad off to the side, momentarily setting aside her job and role as my counsellor. “You knew what you needed and made it possible. He might have followed you here, sure, but he never once interrupted your progress. He stayed away as you attended school, got a job, and even went out with other men. He respected your recovery, so what makes you think he needs the same things? You’re in the field, Katya, so you understand how trauma is different for every person. How everyone has different healing methods. That’s my take on it.” She pulls her notes back onto her lap, her expression returning to polite but professional.

Shit. Maybe she’s right.

Ava glances at her watch. “We have a few more minutes, and I’d like to leave you with a bit of homework before our next session. Determine what path you want to take next. You’ve been home for a month, but week after week, you tell me how uncertain you are about your decisions, while doubling down onthem immediately. You don’t have to have it figured out, but enough we can formulate a goal. Do we return to your old one and work on those walls again, processing everything from the past accompanied by everything that happened recently, or do we come up with a new goal?”

A new goal. A new path. Rebuilding walls or moving into the future without them.

“I can do that.”

After the session,I head to my next appointment. Given my abrupt absence from Toronto, my Friday self-defence lessons got cancelled and rebooked into the only other time they had available, which happens to now be Sunday afternoons, after therapy. It’s a lot of self-building in one day, but I’m all for it because then I head to my parents in the late afternoon and stay until dinner, and they’re always nothing but supportive.