Page 154 of Shattered

Her therapist, Irene, didn’t push her at all. She let her talk when she was ready. That may have meant spending the first forty minutes of that first hour in almost complete silence, but now talking to her felt like talking to an old friend. Their sessions mostly covered things that had happened to her in her childhood through teenage years. Those experiences were so far in the past and somehow felt like safer topics. It was like peeling back an onion. Each session she offered up a little more information, and each session she left feeling a tad bit lighter.

She hadn’t yet broached the subject of Christian. That pain was still too fresh. There were a few rare moments in which she opened up to Callum. She could tell he wanted her to talk about it more but, just like Irene, Callum never pushed her. And at night, when the nightmares became too much to bear, he held her close.

They hadn’t spent a single night apart since she’d left the hospital. That was probably the reason he had pretty much moved into her room. Paint supplies and all. They were actively discussing the possibility of moving into a place together for her senior year, but that was an entirely separate process she just didn’t have the mental capacity for at the moment.

“What’s for dinner?” Sam asked as she hopped up into his truck.

“I need to grab some paperwork from Topline, so I was thinking we could swing by and get something off the menu, that way we don’t have to cook.”

Sam gave him a large smile in place of a yes. She had always loved the food at Topline, and dating the owner meant she no longer had to pay a thing for meals. She didn’t hate that at all.

By the time she crawled into bed that night, Callum was right behind her. He was mentally exhausted from spending any free moment with his head bent over a canvas.

It was his therapy.

She still held onto the hope that he would agree to go to the center and find someone to work through his own trauma with but, just as he didn’t push her, she didn’t push him.

There were days when she hated walking into that room and sitting on that couch, and then there were days when she practically ran inside.

Grief was a funny thing. It made itself known in the most random of places. It would hide away for a few minutes, or hours, or even days, and then just when she thought she was getting better, just when she forgot exactly why she needed to remember it in the first place, it would insert itself exactly where she didn’t want it to be.

“Even the most perfectly paved roads have bumps.” That’s what Irene had said that one day when Sam was bursting with anger.

“What?” Sam had questioned through the tears.

“They can level the dirt and smooth out the clay. They can level the gravel and put the lines in exactly the right place, and a tree limb, or hurricane, or hot day will cause the road to split, or bend, or break.”

Sam had just stared at her then, her lips slightly trembling.

“Your road started off with a few bumps. Hell, your road started off missing entire pieces. But you worked hard, and you smoothed that road out. You filled in all the little cracks and potholes, and you painted the lines exactly as they should be. You paved an immaculate road. One that most anyone would love to travel. And then a wayward root that you never planned for sprung up from the depths of the earth and tore a seam directly down the middle.”

Sam had found herself nodding.

“You can plan and organize and detail out every single scenario you can think of, but there will always be things outside of your control.”

“I just want to go back to before.” Sam’s voice had come out as a whisper.

“You can’t. You can find what you need, and you can patch the hole. You can fill it, and smooth it out, and make it look perfect on the outside. But deep down under the surface, there will always be a small crack. You may even patch it up so well that no one may ever even know it’s there. But it won’t just go away. You can’t go back to before the crack formed. But, you can stop it from spreading.”

You can stop it from spreading.

That was the phrase that kept spinning through her mind as she lay in bed, snuggled up to Callum.

“I want to volunteer at one of the group homes,” Sam blurted out as Callum drew lazy circles along her back.

His hand paused. “Where did that come from?”

Sam shrugged. In reality, the thought had popped into her mind a few times over the last few weeks.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay. I’ll go with you if you need me.”

She looked up at him. His face was barely visible in the darkened room, but his blue eyes still seemed to glisten.

“Have I ever told you how much I love your eyes?”

He batted them for dramatic effect and she laughed into his chest.

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