her. Not the truth; she’d have me locked up in a padded cell. But some version of it, perhaps. Something that would make her help me.
I sat on the couch in the waiting room until it was my turn. A plump, comfortable woman in wrinkled slacks came out and glanced around; I figured she was a patient until she called my – Sarah’s – name.
“Sarah Winslow? I’m Dr. Riley.” We shook hands. She actually reminded me a little of my mother, my mother with a salon haircut and an expensive skin care regimen, but with the same warmth and slightly scatter-brained air. When we sat down together in her office, though, she was all business.
“I had Dr. Shin fax over your records, Sarah. Want to tell me why you stopped seeing him?”
I shrugged. “Things kind of. . .changed for me. My life totally fell apart, actually.”
“I see. In what way?”
“Well, I – I haven’t been feeling like myself.”
“Did something happen, Sarah?” She looked at me so intently. Her eyes were very blue. I almost felt like she could see right into me. I shifted in my seat. “Right before you started feeling this way, what happened?”
I swallowed hard. A scene flashed before my eyes: night, in the alley. Ricky pushing me down. The smell of urine, the beer on his breath. I opened my mouth to speak, but found I couldn’t.
“Go ahead, Sarah,” Dr. Riley said gently.
It all came pouring out then, all of it. Or almost. I told her how he’d raped me. How he’d wrapped his hands around my neck until I couldn’t breathe. How he’d left me for dead. “I feel like he did kill me,” I said, through tears. “I feel like I’ll never be safe again.”
I didn’t tell her I knew my attacker. I didn’t tell her how I’d woken up the next day as Sarah. But the truth of it, the core of what had happened to me, that I did tell. It was the first time I’d put it into words.
When the hour was up, I felt raw, miserable, weepy – and better. It wasn’t anything Dr. Riley said, though she said a few things that made sense, like how none of it was my fault. It was the talking that did it. I felt like I’d been carrying around this huge weight, and what Dr. Riley did was get underneath with me and help me carry it. It was going to take me a long time to put it down and walk away. I knew that. But this was a start.
I left Dr. Riley’s with a second appointment and a prescription to fill. She told me the pills wouldn’t start working right off, that it would take some time, but that in a few weeks I should start feeling better.
I believed her. What choice did I have?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Over the next few weeks, things actually did start look up.
I took baby steps. Matt and I hung out together, just as friends. We went out to lunch or dinner a couple of times a week, or had takeout at my place. We watched TV in his apartment or went to Golden Gate Park and played soccer on the grass.
He was a really nice guy. Not Ken-doll perfect, but that was a relief. It turned out he was kind of a slob. He liked watching weird sports, like table tennis and cricket. He had a nervous habit of drumming his fingers on the table, a habit that drove me crazy. But he was also a good listener. He could tell when I was upset, and knew how to make little jokes until I couldn’t help but crack a smile.
He told me a lot about himself. He’d grown up in a small town in Idaho but always dreamed of living in San Francisco. He’d worked for a start-up until it lost its funding, and now he was a computer systems administrator for a big law firm. He was an only child and had always been quiet and shy; he was finally starting to relax with me, though.
I talked about my present but not about my past. If Matt thought that was strange, he didn’t bring it up. It was one of the things I liked most about him.
We were both too nervous – or too wary – to jump into a romance. Sometimes I wondered if we ever would. Sometimes I thought it was okay if we didn’t. Other times, he did something so adorable that