500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(31)

Anita’s face winced, just a little.

“Mummy’s busy, darling,” she hissed out of the side of her mouth.

“Samosa done fall in the toilet.”

Lissa and Anita both froze.

“Um, do you want to go sort that out?” said Lissa.

“No, no, I’m sure it’s fine,” said Anita, doing her best to look unflustered. “Now, where were we? What we’re going to do is carefully go through everything that happened that day, look carefully at the details . . .”

“I just eating it.”

There was another long pause.

“Just go,” said Lissa, even as Anita jumped up, knocking over a tall pile of notes and case files onto the desktop as she went. Lissa glanced at them as she heard a lot of yelling and negotiation taking place off-screen. “PTSD” was written on hers; she could make it out, bold as brass. She stared at it. Was that her? Was that who she was? Some crazy person? With a label and a padded cell and . . .

Anita came back, her dark hair ruffled, noisy crying still happening off-screen.

“So,” she said. She started clearing up the papers, spilling her coffee cup in the process. She screwed up her face. “Sorry,” she said. “Some days . . .”

“I know,” said Lissa. “You work for the NHS. I know what it’s like.”

But inside she was burning up with her diagnosis.

“So, I have PTSD?” she found herself saying abruptly.

“What?” Anita’s phone was ringing. She glanced at it, hung it up. It started ringing again.

“That’s . . . that’s what you think I have?”

“I think it’s a— Sorry, I just have to get this.”

She grabbed the phone.

“Where are you?”

There was a long pause.

“Well, where’s your bus pass? . . . But if you don’t take your bus pass how can you expect . . . I’m working here! . . . Well, you’ll just have to wait. Where are you? Well, what can you see?”

She made an apologetic face at Lissa, who was beginning to wonder whether this was, in fact, the therapy, designed to make her feel better about being all by herself in the middle of nowhere.

By the time Anita had untangled herself from the complexities of the phone call and was nervously eyeing something Lissa couldn’t see but could only assume was almost certainly her car keys, their time was almost up.

“Whether it is or whether it isn’t,” said Anita eventually, “we’ve found the standard treatment protocol helpful.”

“I know the standard treatment protocol,” said Lissa a little snappily. “You want me to go over it all again.”

Anita nodded sympathetically. “It’s certainly something we’d want you to try.” Her eyes meandered sideways again.

Lissa saw red suddenly. “But I do. I go . . . I go through it in my head. Every day. All day. Every time I close my eyes. Every time I see a teenage boy, or hear a yell or a shout.”

“I realize that,” said Anita as patiently as she could. “That’s why you have to start from the beginning and go through every inch of it. So it loses its power.

“So. Tell me about that day.”

“That actual day?” The knot in Lissa’s stomach tightened. She took a very deep breath.

“Uh-huh.”

“Right now?”

Anita blinked.

IT WAS PAINSTAKING, painful. Every detail. The sun on the window frame. The saying goodbye to old Mrs. Marks. The noise of the car revving up . . . its speed, faster and faster. The gleam of the phone in the air.

“I was looking at the boys shouting at each other . . .”

Lissa dissolved into sobs. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”

“You can,” said Anita softly. “You can, Lissa. You were looking at the boys shouting at each other,” she repeated. “You were watching them. What did you notice?”

Lissa shook, her face creased with tears. Then she took another breath, opened her mouth . . .

“Mummy!”

A tiny, sweet face appeared, marched up to the screen, seemed to stare directly at Lissa, and then, to the surprise of everyone, slammed the computer shut.

LISSA FELT COMPLETELY stranded. The tears still falling down her face, she stared at her computer screen, but the connection was gone and she couldn’t call Anita back; that was how these consultations worked.

She went, dejectedly, upstairs and turned on the taps to the bath. The pounding of the hot water, the fizzing over of the bubbles; gradually the sounds overtook her sobs. But the fear remained. There was something wrong with her. That’s why she’d been sent away.

She grabbed her book, retrieved her tea, and sank slowly into the bubble bath. Every time her mind spun back to Kai she forced her attention back to her book and took another slug of tea. As her mind quieted, she listened outside, to the wind whistling through the trees and the calls of distant owls, and instead of finding them threatening, she found them calming.

She knew, even in the brief time they’d managed to discuss the incident, that on one level, Anita was absolutely right. She would have to think about it, would have to be able to work it through in her head, to stop the panic attacks and the anxiety.

But right here, with a warm bath and a book, and almond-scented bubbles and a cup of tea, and the sound of the wind through the trees instead of traffic and sirens and helicopters—well, she wasn’t going to think about it. Not right now.