We moved toward the exit. The stairs, not the elevator. I might have been making progress, but I was no Wonder Woman. That one was going to take some time. I tried to talk Bry into meeting me down, taking the elevator, because he was still favoring his side something fierce from where he had broken two ribs.
But Bry being Bry, he wouldn't hear of it.
So we went down the stairs as slowly as he needed until we moved outside.
We were going to go make good on my idea for trying to do lunch again, but not for another hour and a half. There was one stop first and it was what had my belly doing strange little insistent flip-flops as we got into the car and drove into town.
The office was what one might expect- neat, neutral, comforting but impersonal.
I was standing at the desk, Bry refusing to listen to my telling him I was fine and he could run and get coffee if he wanted, was sitting reading some woodworking magazine on the table.
And then there was a voice I'd have recognized anyywhere, having heard it as much as I had. "Danielle, you have Miss McRae as my one o'clock. You must have this wrong. She is always a video..."
"Hey Amy," I interrupted her, using the name she preferred.
Her head snapped up from her papers, her mouth falling open, her eyes going huge. "Dusty? What... how..." She shook her head hard, clearing it, slipping her professional mask back on. "When you cancelled your last few video sessions, I figured you were going through a rough patch," she admitted, concern clear in her voice.
I figured that being a therapist had to have been boring a fair amount of the time- people whining and moaning about the most banal, uninteresting things for hours on end, not actually having mental issues, but essentially needed to pay someone to listen to them because no one else would ever want to do it for free. But there had to have been patients here and there who really touched them, made them want to help.
I was pretty sure I was one of those patients to Dr. Amy Robertson.
"I actually had a lot going on," I admitted as she moved to open the locked door toward the back of the office and let me through.
"Is that Bry?" she asked as she closed the door and led me down a narrow hall that had my chest getting tight.
"Yeah."
I put my hand on my belly and took a few deep breaths as she let me into her office. There was a white desk situated almost in a corner, out of the way, with the main focal point being the four places she had to sit in the center around a low coffee table. There was an old-fashioned gray tufted couch, an armchair, an accent chair with no arms, and a papasan chair. A lot of thought went into that set-up and I found myself going toward the papasan, slipping out of my shoes and letting it surround me, needing to feel a bit protected. I imagined the couch was for laying down and the accent chair was for people who didn't like feeling trapped.
Taking her cue from me, she sat in the armchair and gave me a smile. "I'm going to be honest here. I wasn't sure I would ever see this day."
I wasn't offended by that.
I wasn't sure I would ever see this day either.
"Yeah, me either," I admitted.
"You alright anxiety-wise? Need anything?" she asked, her eyes dipping to where my hand was still on my belly for a second before moving up.
"No. I'm alright for now."
"So. You're here," she said, giving me a smile. "Did you want to talk about that 'lot you had going on' you mentioned?"
"Sure," I said, taking another deep breath.
Then I launched into it. From the night of the alarm ringing and being carried out of the building fireman-style to getting robbed and beat, heavily editing out the details. I knew about the patient-client thing, but I wasn't exactly sure how it would stretch. I talked a lot about Ryan and our strange, but utterly perfect and unprecedented romance. I told her that I had visited my uncle, met Ryan's sisters-in-law, and a neighbor of Ryan's, meaning Ross Ward, but not giving names.
"You have been busy," she observed when I finished, shaking her head a little like it hadn't completely sunk in yet. "I'm really proud of you, Dusty," she said, the weight in her words showing how much she meant it.
"Turns out you were right all these years," I said with a wry smile. "All I needed to do was do something."
"We both know it's not always that easy," she said with a soft smile of her own. "Had I known that a fireman hold out of the building would have done the trick, I might have sent one there two years ago," she added, making me laugh. I liked that quality of hers. She was a professional, but she was also just a person. She joked around and made comments that were perhaps not exactly appropriate, but humanized her to me so much more. "This Ryan thing. It sounds serious."