Page 9 of The Plus One
“Then, Indira, I hope you can understand that you experiencingpersonal struggles—ones that you deal with in yourpersonaltherapy sessions on your own time—isn’t preventing you from serving your patients. If anything, it’s you putting in the work on yourself so you can be more present for them.”
Indira chewed on her lip as she turned this over. She’d spent so much of her life feeling like she wasn’t good enough for people—someone who always got left behind no matter how hard she tried—it was hard and obscenely uncomfortable to accept this line of thinking.
Dr. Koh cleared her throat. “Do you think that some of these feelings that are being churned up, making you question your adequacy, might come from your father’s—”
“Nope,” Indira said, popping thep. “That was a hiccup in my timeline. Not worth discussing.”
Dr. Koh tilted her head, giving Indira a look that said it was very worth discussing, but Indira turned her focus to her phone.
“Oh gosh, that looks like time. I don’t want to throw your schedule off,” Indira said, brushing her hands over her cheeks to make sure no tears had escaped before standing.
“I appreciate your conscientiousness regarding my schedule,” Dr. Koh said, glancing at her watch. “But I do assure you that our session running a bit overtime to have an honest discussion would not a disaster make.”
Indira pressed her lips together, nodding. “Right. Right. I just don’t want to bethatpatient, ya know?” She moved toward the door.
“Indira?” Dr. Koh said.
Indira stopped, eyes lowered as she glanced over her shoulder, hand poised on the knob.
“I have no doubt you are wonderful at what you do. Psychiatry takes a special understanding of where chemical imbalances and emotions meet. But when you come to these meetings, I hope you know it’s okay to take off that hat.”
“I… uh… I don’t wear hats,” Indira said, staring at the floor. “Rather prone to hat hair.”
Dr. Koh indulged her with a chuckle. “Fair enough. But what I’m saying is, in our sessions, you don’t have to be a put-together doctor. You don’t have to be a source of wisdom or strength. You don’t have to be anything but human. I’m here to listen to you. Be here for you. It’s okay to lower those walls in this one hour you take for yourself each week.”
Indira was silent, teeth clenched and jaw ticcing. Part of her wanted to shatter. To crumple on Dr. Koh’s ugly carpeting and pour her soul into the room. She wanted to talk about the ache that never went away. The hole in her heart that no one seemed able to fill. She wanted to sob out every fear that tore at her seams.
How her deepest want was just to be loved, and how she wasn’t sure anyone ever could.
But admitting that, shining a floodlight on those dark corners of her thoughts, would make all that hurt she kept bottled away more real. More painful.
Instead, she straightened her spine, swallowed past the lump in her throat, and looked up to smile at Dr. Koh.
“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate you saying that. I really do feel like I get a great deal out of our sessions.”
After a nod from Dr. Koh, Indira scuttled out of the building and onto the street, deciding that was enough of sitting with her feelings for one day.
She worked hard to keep her messy bits hidden from others, and the raw honesty of being a patient in a therapy session always left her off-kilter. Shaking it off, she boarded a train and headed toward Collin’s, holding herself together with the promise of a nice cry facedown on the bed as soon as she got home.
The one silver lining in this shit sandwich Indira was smooshed between was that she certainly didn’t care about being a mess around her brother and, by extension, Jeremy. She and Collin had supported each other through so many messes growing up, she felt incredibly safe letting her guard down around him.
Even annoying ass Jude didn’t elicit Indira’s usual need to be thebest version of herself. She’d known him far too long—and they’d both observed each other’s worst awkward teenage years—to care what he thought of her. Some small comforts, even from the world’s most annoying source, would never change.
CHAPTER 5
Jude
Living with Indira, Collin, and Jeremy was, to put it plainly, a sensory assault. The siblings seemed to honor their Greek and Italian roots primarily by seeing who could talk louder, with Jeremy reveling in the noise. Jude wasn’t sure three people ever laughed so fucking often and so fucking noisily. Except for when Lizzie Blake, one of Indira’s best friends since high school, visited. That was a new level of sound.
Over the past few days, Jude had discovered one way to hang out with Collin without putting his eardrums at risk (for the most part): watchingGrey’s Anatomy.
“Pick me. Choose me. Love me,” Collin whispered in time with Meredith Grey on the TV, pressing his head against the back of the couch as he blinked past his tears.
When the episode ended, Jude stood up, pacing a circle around the living room, hands planted on his hip as he fought off crying too.
“Told you it’s a good show,” Collin said, shooting Jude a shit-eating grin, his red-rimmed eyes crinkling at the corners.
“It has its moments,” Jude conceded, finally getting his bearings and widening his eyes against the pressure building behind them. Judenevercried… What waswrongwith him?
