The clinic smells like eucalyptus and good intentions.
I stand in the doorway of Dr. Navarro’s waiting room and take it in: white walls, blond wood, plants that look misted daily by a very calm person. Someone curated the art—neutral landscapes that don’t offend anyone’s nervous system. A sound machine burbles in the corner, imitation brook over the faint distant thrum of downtown traffic.
My sneakers squeak on the polished floor. I wipe the soles on the mat twice, harder than necessary.
The receptionist gives me a sympathetic smile. “Hi, Mara. You’re right on time.”
“That’s my superpower,” I say. “Punctual trauma.”
Her smile flickers, then settles. “You can go right back. Third door on the left.”
I pass a wall of brochures about EMDR, CBT, mindfulness, a rainbow of acronyms promising relief. Some of them feature soft-focus photos of women gazing out windows with serene expressions I don’t recognize. The glass in those images looks spotless.
My phone buzzes in my pocket with the familiar mechanical chime. I don’t have to look to know it’s another notification from the Maple Hollow Facebook group or someone tagging me in a grief post. #LightForCaleb, probably, a candle against a sunset.
I press my hand over the phone until the buzzing stops and keep walking.
Dr. Navarro’s door stands open. She looks up from her tablet as I appear, dark hair pulled into a loose knot, glasses perched on top of her head. Her office is more lived-in than the waiting room—bookshelves, a faded rug, a chipped mug on her desk. The window behind her shows a smear of gray sky and the suggestion of wet brick.
“Good morning,” she says, setting the tablet aside. “Come in.”
“Morning,” I reply, already cataloging details the way I would in a chapter. Light from the window. Framed diploma slightly crooked. A small glass bowl of polished stones on the side table, ready for anxious hands.
I do not touch the stones. I sit on the couch instead, testing the cushion. It tries to hug me; I resist.
“How did the memorial go?” she asks.
“No one spontaneously combusted,” I say. “So by suburban standards, huge success.”
One corner of her mouth lifts. “That’s one metric.”
I pick at a loose thread on my jeans. “Everyone said the right things. Brought the casseroles. Hashtagged the photos. The HOA will be proud.”
“And you?” she asks. “How did you sleep afterward?”
I think of the cold coffee, the glowing rectangle of Liam’s window, the way I dropped below my own sill when his gaze met the camera.
“Like a baby,” I say. “Up every two hours screaming.”
She nods, unoffended by the sarcasm, and reaches for a notepad. “Nightmares?”
“No,” I say. “That would require actual sleep.”
She studies me for a beat, then leans back in her chair. “I know you hate the opening check-in. So I’ll give you my agenda instead.”
“There’s an agenda,” I say. “Good. I was worried we were just vibing.”
“I’d like us to keep working on the narrative of the night of the crash,” she says. “Last time, you got to the part where you saw the flashing lights on Old Willow Road. You stopped there.”
A thin film of sweat blooms on my palms. I wipe them on my jeans.
“That’s the part everyone cares about,” I say. “The scene at the guardrail. It’s the hook.”
“It’s also where your memory gets the most fragmented,” she replies. “You’ve described it in different ways on different days. That’s not a criticism. It’s what trauma does.”
“Trauma, or brain damage?” I tap my temple. “Because the ER doctor blamed it on the mild concussion. He made it sound like I tripped over my own grief and bonked my head.”
“You told me you fell at the crash site,” she says softly.
The taste of copper rises in my mouth. “I stepped on glass,” I say. “There was glass everywhere. I slid on it. My feet went out. My head hit…something. Pavement? Metal? I don’t know. Next thing I remember, a paramedic shining a light in my eyes and telling me to follow his finger.”
Headlights in fog, flashing lights, phone screen light—all of it swims together for a second. I blink hard.
“Concussion can absolutely affect memory encoding,” Dr. Navarro says. “But trauma does too. They’re layered in your case.”
“Great,” I say. “Double feature.”
She folds her hands. “I want to talk about certainty today.”
“I’m very certain I don’t like that topic.”
“I know.” Her tone stays even. “You’ve said several times that you’re sure the official story of the crash is wrong. That’s important, and we can keep exploring it. But I also hear a lot of certainty about what you remember—or think you should remember.”
I stare at the bookshelf behind her, at a spine that reads The Body Keeps the Score. “Is this where you tell me my brain is lying?”
“Not lying,” she says. “Protecting. Editing. Imagine your memory is…is glass.” Her hand lifts, fingers framing an invisible pane. “Something shatters it—like a crash. Pieces go everywhere. Your mind picks up enough shards to make a picture so you can still function. But that picture might have gaps. Or it might include pieces from nearby scenes that don’t quite belong.”
I swallow. The image lands with an unpleasant accuracy. Glass on the road. Glass in my shoes. Glass over Caleb’s photos.
“That sounds reassuring,” I say. “Really.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong about the crash,” she continues. “I’m saying we need to approach your memories with curiosity, not just conviction. Certainty can be deceptive, especially when it comes wrapped in guilt.”
“You’re implying I might be filling in blanks to punish myself.”
“I’m saying it’s possible you’re filling in blanks without realizing it,” she says. “That’s what human brains do. We’re story machines. You, especially.”
The word story sparks irritation and recognition in equal measure. I cross my arms.
“So what,” I ask, “you want me to stop trusting my own head?”
“I want you to notice where it goes silent,” she says. “Those silences are data, too.”
Her gaze softens. “I have an exercise in mind. It pulls on your strengths instead of fighting them.”
“If you hand me a gratitude journal, I’m walking out.”
She laughs, a short, genuine sound. “No glitter pens, I promise. I want you to write the night of the crash as if it were a chapter in your novel. Present tense, sensory details, no skipping. From the last normal moment you remember to the moment the police spoke to you.”
My throat tightens. “That’s cute. You think I haven’t already done that. In my head. A thousand times.”
“In your head is different,” she says. “On paper, you can see where you jump. Where the film cuts.”
I picture words spilling across the screen, stopping at some invisible cliff. The idea makes my stomach tighten, but beneath the resistance, something flickers—curiosity, thin and sharp.
“Fine,” I say. “Homework. I’m great at deadlines. Just ask my editor.”
She nods. “Bring whatever you write next time, if you’re comfortable. We can look at it together, not to fact-check you, but to notice the shape.”
“And if the shape says the police report is garbage?” I ask.
“Then we have a clearer starting point for what you want to do about that,” she says.
I uncross my arms, then cross my ankles instead. “You mentioned EMDR once. The eye thing. Is this a prelude?”
“It’s one option,” she says. “EMDR can help access memories that are stored more in the body than in narrative form. It can also surface imagery that isn’t literal. That’s why we’d need to hold anything that comes up very gently.”
“Translation,” I say. “I might see things that aren’t real.”
“You might see things that are metaphor, or mixture,” she replies. “That doesn’t make them useless. But I don’t want to rush you into it. Writing the scene will give us more to work with. If we decide together to try EMDR, we’ll have a baseline.”
There’s that word again: together. It lands heavier than I expect. Most of the time, my grief feels like a solo project I didn’t sign up for.
“Okay,” I say quietly. “I’ll write it.”
“Good.” She picks up her pen. “And in the meantime, if your mind tries to tell you that not remembering every second means you failed, I’d like you to notice that, too.”
I snort. “I’ll add it to my failure log.”
“Or,” she says, “you could add it to your data log.”
Micro-hook: what will the data say when I stop narrating and start counting?
I leave the clinic with a folded appointment card in my pocket and a faint ache between my eyes. Outside, the air smells like wet asphalt and exhaust. The clouds hang low over the city, same gray that covers Maple Hollow on bad days.
On the drive home, the freeway hum vibrates through the steering wheel. Headlights streak past, reflected in my windshield. A semi passes on my left; the rush of air rattles the car in a way that jolts a flash through me: the guardrail under the overpass, the sound metal made when—
My chest tightens. I turn the radio on too loud, drown the fragment in a wall of music.
By the time I pull into my driveway, the cul-de-sac is steeped in early evening fog. The slope of the street funnels it down so it clings low, brushing the lawns the HOA loves so much. Porch lights flick on in automatic sequence, tiny yellow islands.
Across the way, Liam’s house looks quiet, blinds drawn. No glowing rectangles tonight. My shoulders release a notch I didn’t realize they held.
Inside, the house smells like coffee and lemon cleaner from yesterday’s frantic pre-memorial scrub. The dining table still wears the ghost of the buffet line—faint water rings, a smear of frosting, a stray plastic fork.
I clear a space, move aside the stack of sympathy cards, and set my laptop in the middle. Beside it, I place a legal pad and pen, because sometimes my brain cooperates better with ink.
The chair creaks when I sit. I plug in the laptop, open a new document, and type a title without thinking: THE NIGHT OF.
The blinking cursor waits.
I flex my fingers, inhale the bitter scent of the coffee I left reheating, and start.
The last normal thing is the text message. Caleb’s name lights up my phone against the dark of the living room, tiny sun in my hand.
I write in present tense, like she asked. I describe the way the couch cushions sag under me, the TV light stuttering across the window, the mechanical chime that announces his text.
I pull my phone from my pocket and scroll back, thumb scrolling through months of digital residue. There it is, preserved in blue and white bubbles.
I’m fine, Mom. Chill.
Time stamp: 11:07 p.m.
I type it into the scene.
11:07. I stare at the word fine until it blurs. I smell the faint burnt popcorn from the bowl on the coffee table. I taste the cheap red wine drying my tongue. I type back: Call me. He doesn’t.
My shoulders knot. I keep going.
I describe pacing through the house, opening the front door to check the street, listening for the distant rise of an engine that might be his. I describe the way the fog outside my window thickened, wrapping the cul-de-sac. How the glow of other people’s screens pulsed behind their curtains.
Every few sentences, I glance at my phone to anchor myself. I scroll to my call log. The police number sits pinned in my memory and my recents.
Incoming call from an unknown number: 11:23 p.m.
I stare at the digits, counting.
Ten…no. Eleven…no.
My brain, traitor that it is, stutters.
I tap the screen again. 11:23. I go back to the text. 11:07.
Sixteen minutes.
I press the heel of my hand into my forehead. The skin there feels thinner, more vulnerable, where the ER nurse once parted my hair to check the swelling from the fall. Mild concussion, they said. No bleed. Observe for nausea, confusion, worsening headache.
Confusion. Check.
I set the phone down beside the laptop and write faster.
11:07 to 11:23. That is the span. Sixteen minutes. In that time, somewhere between my house and the curve under the leaning overpass, the car leaves the road.
I type what I do remember: standing in the living room, frozen, TV noise washing over me without meaning. The sensation that my heart was in my throat. The urge to call and the decision not to, because I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his friends.
Then…nothing.
My fingers hover over the keys.
I try to write the moment I knew. A siren. A knock. A gut punch. But the images I grab slide away, slippery.
My phone buzzes again on the table, making me jump. The familiar chime fractures my concentration.
Tessa, checking in.
How’d therapy go? You survive the lava lamp of feelings?
I ignore the text and go back to the screen. My pulse thuds in my ears.
“You can do this,” I tell myself. “Just write the next beat.”
I close my eyes.
The smell of wet pavement rises. Pine and gasoline. The crunch of glass under my shoes. The shock of cold air on my face as I run, lungs burning.
But that’s later. That’s at the crash.
What happens between 11:07 and 11:23, in my house, in my body, is static. A blank section of film.
I open my eyes and stare at the half-finished sentence on the screen.
In that time…
I can’t finish it. My fingers won’t move.
Micro-hook: what is my mind protecting in those sixteen minutes I can’t touch?
I push the laptop back and grab the legal pad instead, pen digging into the paper.
I write the times down in block numbers:
11:07 – text
11:23 – call
Underneath, I leave a line and write:
???
My chest tightens again, sharper now. If I build any theory about Caleb’s crash—about guardrails, about corporate cover-ups, about neighbors with camera grids—it rests on the foundation of that night. And that foundation apparently has a sixteen-minute sinkhole in it.
“You don’t get to do this,” I whisper. I’m talking to my brain, my body, the universe, I don’t know. “You don’t get to cut the reel right when it matters.”
I reach up and touch my scalp at the back, fingers finding the faint ridge of scar under my hair where the skin split when I fell at the crash site. The ER doctor said that kind of concussion could mess with short-term memory.
“You gave yourself an out,” I say to my reflection in the dark window across the room. “Convenient.”
Outside, the fog presses against the glass. A car’s headlights crest the top of the Maple Hollow slope, smear across the neighboring houses, then my own. For a heartbeat, the reflection of my face vanishes, replaced by twin beams of light. Windshield. Window. Frame within frame.
Truth and illusion layered, like Dr. Navarro said.
I sit back down and pull the laptop toward me again. My hands shake, but I set them on the keys anyway.
“Fine,” I tell the blank patch between 11:07 and 11:23. “You don’t want to hand me the memory? I’ll work it from the outside.”
I type a new line.
Those sixteen minutes are missing. Not erased, not imaginary. Missing. A chapter torn out. I’m going to find it.
The words steady me more than I expect. This, at least, is something I know how to do. I’ve spent a career building timelines, spotting continuity errors, interrogating motives. I can turn that lens inward, even if it cuts.
EMDR can wait. So can polite exercises in curiosity. I’m not just a patient on a couch; I’m also the only living witness to the story I keep rewriting.
My phone lights up again, Tessa’s name glowing on the table, mechanical chime puncturing the quiet.
Call me when you can. Love you.
I press my fingers against the glass of the window beside the table. The pane is cold, slick with condensation on the outside, my own fingerprint smeared on the inside. Somewhere beyond it, Old Willow Road curves under a leaning overpass. Somewhere in that dark, the missing chapter waits.
“Those sixteen minutes belong to me,” I whisper. “I’m taking them back.”
The fog outside holds its breath.
I stare at the numbers on the page—11:07, 11:23, ???—until they blur, and I know there’s no going back to passive not-knowing. One way or another, those minutes are going to crack open. The only question is what they’ll spill out when they do.