Page 22 of Near Miss

I don’t tell him that because I’m alive and breathing and whole, and that counts for something. Instead, I tell him about the other day. “I had a particularly bad panic attack a few days ago. Just outside, I’m sure security caught it on camera.”

“Brought on by . . . ?”

“Noises. A few different ones. A car backfired. Sirens. A friend was showing me this commercial and he turned the volume up when he leaned in and—”

“A friend? Beckett Davis?”

My eyes pinch at Rav. “Yes. How do you know?”

He gives me a flat look before pushing his hands into his knees and leaning back in his chair. “People in this hospital talk, Dr. Roberts. It’s not uncommon knowledge he’s doing some sort of PR volunteer image-rescue campaign here, nor is it uncommon knowledge that he’s been spotted with you doing your rounds.”

I’m tempted to offer him a slow clap, but I feel more tired than mean. “Who needs a psychiatry degree when you have gossipy hospital staff?”

“Could have saved me a few hundred thousand dollars, too.” He smirks, nodding along. “Are you reconsidering what we’ve been working on? The idea that you want to prioritize yourself? Live for you?”

“Reconsider? Why would I reconsider the very thing that made me come see you in the first place?” My fingers twitch against the arm of the couch.

“Maybe you’re lonely.” He shrugs, like it’s a nothing statement and not something that someone might find insulting. “You ended your last relationship in pursuit of your goal to live for yourself, like you say.”

I purse my lips, and my nostrils flare. “I’m not lonely. I have my sister. I have my dad. I have Kate and Willa.”

Rav doesn’t look impressed by the mention of my two family members and my two best friends who don’t even live in Toronto, so I push against the couch and straighten my shoulders. “And I have Beckett. He’s my friend.”

“Oh?” Rav crosses his arms, looking amused, as he leans back in the chair. It doesn’t feel like a terribly professional pose, and I feel a bit like taking his clipboard and smacking him with it. But he cocks his head and continues. “The Near Miss superstar is your friend?”

“Near Miss?”

“That’s what they call him, in the media. Online.” Rav studies me, like he’s waiting for some sort of reaction, and I don’t wantto give him one—even though my nose wrinkles, my stomach knots and I think my heart hurts at hearing that. “Beckett ‘Near Miss’ Davis.”

“That’s rather cruel,” I whisper.

Rav nods, fingers flexing and drumming against his bicep. “I agree. So, if he’s your friend, have you talked to him since you had your panic attack in front of him? Or did you run away and avoid all contact since?”

I don’t give him the satisfaction of answering, because we both know he’s right.

The silence falls again, and Rav waits. Fingers occasionally tap against his arm. His eyes glance to the clock on his coffee table, until he finally exhales. “Well, you’ve bested me again in these last fifteen minutes, Greer. So I’ll leave you with some parting words of wisdom I hoped you’d arrive at yourself: There’s a difference between setting boundaries to protect yourself and being alone.”

My mouth parts, indignant. I’m not sure what I’m about to say. I don’t like the feel of those words either. They hit too close to home—they touch that phantom ache under my right rib cage and they crack the bones my body worked so hard to repair.

But my phone starts going off. I glance down. It’s an emergency page. I hold it up, triumphant and vindicated, like the session wasn’t ending anyway. “I have to go.”

“That you do.” Rav leans forward again and raises his eyebrows at me before picking up his abandoned clipboard. “Think about what that page means, Greer. It might just be an insignificant noise, something you’re used to now, so it doesn’t startle you or hurt you. But it means something. However you want to think about and categorize all the events in your life that made you, well,you. They all led here, and there’s a real, living, breathing person on the other end of that phone who needs youto save them. Regardless of whether or not someone was there to save you.”

Rav’s psychoanalysis works.

Not for the first time, something he said worms its way into my brain, like some sort of unwanted parasite, and festers there until I can’t think about anything else.

He was right—I practically sprinted away from Beckett, and I responded to his one check-in text with nothing more than a thumbs-up emoji.

It wasn’t a very nice thing to do to a stranger, let alone one you promised to help, or a “friend” as I called him, in a sad attempt to provide something to Rav.

It wasn’t just the idea that I’d somehow maybe done myself a disservice that permeated my brain and caused all my neurons to misfire in Beckett’s direction—it was the idea that there were people out there cruel enough to craft some stupid nickname for him that was kind of a double negative and didn’t really make a lot of sense.

I texted him last night and asked if he had time to come in this afternoon. I actually had a patient who was interested in meeting him. A teenage boy who hadn’t shut up every time I came to round on him, asking whether Beckett Davis was coming in.

I think I lied when I said he was my friend—it wouldn’t be the first time I lied to Rav. I lie to him on a semi-regular basis, at least when he opens up a door to a room I don’t particularly feel like looking into.

He says I lie a lot, about a lot of things, to a lot of people.

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