Tessa blocks the doorway like she’s triaging me.
“You’re going,” she says. “You already confirmed.”
I stand by the front windows of my Craftsman, watching fog drag itself low over Maple Hollow. Headlights smear across the glass when a car turns the corner, a transient stain of white that slides over my reflection and disappears. My phone buzzes with a calendar alert—EMDR with Navarro, 10:00 a.m.—its mechanical chime jarring against the distant freeway hum outside.
“I could cancel,” I say. “Tell her Ruiz reopened things and it’s a conflict, or I’m too busy compiling evidence, or—”
“Or you’re terrified of what else your brain might throw at you,” Tessa cuts in. “Which, newsflash, is the point.”
I wrap my arms around myself. “Last time, I walked out thinking I grabbed the wheel and killed my kid.”
“And then a bodycam told you that’s not the whole story,” she says. “You still breathing? Good. That means your brain can handle another round.”
“What if I give them more to use against me?” I ask. “More ‘unreliable narrator’ material for Evelyn’s smear file?”
Tessa steps closer, her hand landing briefly on my shoulder. “Then at least you’ll know what they’re using,” she says. “Right now you’re fighting ghosts with half a script.”
Micro-hook: The worst part of memory work isn’t what I might find; it’s admitting that ignorance hasn’t actually kept me safe.
Dr. Navarro’s clinic smells like eucalyptus and printer toner, washed through with the faint sweetness of the café downstairs. The lobby glass throws back a warped version of me—eyes bruised from bad sleep, hair scraped into a knot that didn’t bother pretending to be intentional. Through the glass walls of her office, I see the same weighted blankets and muted paintings, the same faux-calm environment designed to keep people from bolting.
I don’t bolt.
Navarro stands when I enter, smoothing the front of her cardigan. “Hi, Mara,” she says. “Thank you for coming back.”
“Don’t thank me,” I say, sinking onto the familiar couch. “Thank my human parole officer.”
“Tessa?” Navarro smiles, small. “She cares.”
“She pushes,” I correct. “Those overlap, apparently.”
Navarro sits in her chair, crossing one ankle over the other. The little EMDR machine sits on the side table, its two handheld pods coiled with wire, resting like patient metal shells. “Last time we spoke, you had understandable concerns about suggestion,” she says. “About whose narrative was in the room.”
“You mean yours and Liam’s,” I say.
“Partly,” she acknowledges. “You’re also a professional storyteller. Your mind reaches for structure automatically. That can protect you, and distort things. Today, I’d like to experiment with narrowing our focus to pure sensation—body memory, not story arcs. Are you willing to try that?”
I pick up one of the pods, test its weight. Cool against my palm, textured plastic under my fingertips. “What if my body is just as dramatic as the rest of me?” I ask.
“Then we’ll note that,” she says. “And we’ll always hold open the possibility that what comes up is fragmentary, symbolic, or both. Remember: a fragment is data, not a verdict.”
I roll that phrase around in my head—data, not verdict—like it belongs in one of Ruiz’s memos. “Ruiz is re-examining Caleb’s case,” I blurt. “Quietly.”
Navarro’s eyebrows lift. “That’s significant.”
“It means what we do in here might end up under a microscope,” I say. “I don’t want to give anyone a neat little box labeled ‘psychotic episode’ to slide my entire life into.”
“We’re not chasing big answers today,” she says. “We’re checking one thing: what your body knows about the moments right before impact. You control the brakes. If you want to stop, you say stop.”
Micro-hook: I agree to go back into the car, but this time I promise myself I won’t let anyone else write what I see there—not even me.
I lean back, letting the couch swallow me a little. Navarro adjusts the lights so the room pools in warm gold rather than harsh overhead white. Outside the glass wall, someone walks past, their reflection superimposed over the plant in the corner—one more reminder that everything here is seen through layers.
Navarro places the other pod in my left hand and taps a few settings on the device. “Same bilateral stimulation,” she says. “Gentle. You’ll feel the pulses alternate. Focus point?”
I stare at the abstract painting on the wall, all foggy blues and streaked whites. It looks like Old Willow Road under headlights. “That’ll do,” I say.
“All right,” she murmurs. “Take a deep breath in through your nose…hold…out through your mouth. Good. Let your attention drift to the night of the crash. Not the collision. Not yet. Just before. Don’t narrate. Let your body show you. Tell me the first sensation that comes up.”
The pods begin to pulse, left-right, left-right, a soft buzzing against my palms. My eyes glaze, fixed on the painting but not really seeing it. I inhale, scent of eucalyptus thinning into something wetter, colder, older.
“Cold air,” I say. “On my face. My cheeks hurt.”
“Good,” Navarro says. “Stay with the cold. Where are your feet?”
A crunch comes back to me, bone-deep. “On gravel,” I whisper. “It’s not just pavement. The shoulder. Small rocks. They shift.”
The gravel under my sneakers grinds louder the more I focus—a gritty protest with each step. My toes feel cramped in my shoes. The night presses damp against my skin; my breath hangs in front of me in clouds I can’t see, but my lungs fight the thickness.
“You’re standing,” she says. “On the shoulder?”
“Yeah.” I swallow. “The road curves ahead, but we’re…we’re not there yet. We’re pulled over. Hazard lights. That ticking. That sound.”
There it is: tick, tick, tick, like a metronome buried under everything else—the distant rush of trucks on the freeway overhead, the hiss of rain on metal, Caleb’s music muffled behind the car door.
“What do you hear next?” Navarro asks. “Not words. Sounds.”
The pods pulse faster. My hands clench, muscles remembering a steering wheel that isn’t there yet.
“A click,” I breathe. “Sharp. Too loud. Inside the car. Seatbelt release.”
Micro-hook: The click is so clear that every other version of the story suddenly sounds dubbed.
My chest tightens. I can see my own breath clouding the side window, the way my fingers skid on the wet door handle as I yank it open. The interior light floods my eyes, and I’m inside the car again, soaked denim against the upholstery, the air thick with cheap cologne and the metallic tang of adrenaline.
Caleb is in the driver’s seat.
His hand is still on the belt buckle he just unlatched. The strap hangs limp across his chest, already sliding away. His face is turned toward me, not toward the road, illuminated by the dome light and the flashing amber from the hazards. His eyes are glassy but focused, rimmed with red, not quite drunk, not quite sober. Tears sting the edges.
“Describe what you see,” Navarro’s voice says from somewhere far off. “Details, not meaning.”
“His hands,” I whisper. “Knuckles red from gripping the wheel. There’s a small cut on one—right hand. Probably from something stupid earlier. His lips are chapped. He keeps licking them. He smells like…like beer and mint gum and the pine from the air freshener.”
I can hear his breathing, that hitched, angry-inward way he used to breathe when we fought. Only this time, his shoulders sag, not tense. He looks young—so young I momentarily feel like I’m standing over his crib again, not next to a car.
“He’s unbuckling,” Navarro prompts softly. “What happens next?”
Caleb lifts his left hand, fingers trembling, and reaches toward me, palm up.
“You drive,” he says.
His voice is hoarse, threaded with something that’s not quite apology, not quite surrender. His eyes flick to my hands, then back to my face.
“Say the words out loud,” Navarro instructs.
“You drive,” I repeat, my throat tightening around the syllables. “I’m done ruining things.”
In the memory, those words land heavy in the small cabin of the car. They sit on the dashboard between us, heavier than his soccer trophies, heavier than the textbook he left open on the kitchen table three days earlier. I feel myself reaching for them, not knowing whether they are a gift or a sentence.
“What does your body do when he says that?” Navarro asks.
My right hand jerks in my lap. On the night, it had moved toward the wheel without permission, fingers craving control, craving proof that I could still redirect something in this family.
“I…move,” I say. “I slide in. Across the console. My knees knock into the gear shift. I put my hands on the wheel.”
Micro-hook: The car never moves in this memory, and that stillness is louder than any impact I’ve ever tried to imagine.
I feel the wheel under my palms now—cold, slightly textured rubber, damp from his hands. My left foot searches for the clutch that isn’t there; automatic, not stick. I adjust without thinking. My body knows the layout of this car better than my conscious mind ever admitted.
Caleb is moving too, awkwardly twisting toward the passenger side, elbow catching on the seatback. He fumbles for the belt on that side, jaw clenched.
“He’s switching seats,” I say. “We’re switching. We’re not driving yet. I haven’t even—my foot’s on the brake, but the car is in park. We’re just…rearranging.”
“Stay with that,” Navarro says. “Hands on the wheel. Foot on the brake. Notice your breath.”
My breath turns shallow. My nose fills with the smell of wet fabric and his shampoo and the faint plastic reek of the airbag that hasn’t deployed yet but lives in my future. Outside the windshield, Old Willow Road curves into darkness, the guardrail a dull line of metal catching bits of reflected light.
I glance in the rearview.
Headlights bloom in the small mirror, too bright, too big. A pair at first, then doubled by the glass, then smeared by the wet. They’re coming up behind us, too fast for a car stopped on the shoulder, too close for comfort.
“There’s a car,” I say. “Behind us.”
“Notice what your body does,” Navarro says, voice edged now. “Not what you think about it. What you feel.”
My shoulders hunch instinctively. My right hand tightens on the wheel; my left reaches toward Caleb, bracing. Heat licks the back of my neck, a primitive warning. My foot presses harder on the brake even though we’re already stopped. The hazard tick-tick ticks on, indifferent.
“The lights are…high,” I manage. “In the mirror. Too high. Like a truck or an SUV. They fill everything. I can’t see the grille, just light.”
The buzzing in my hands syncs with the phantom thud in my chest. For a breathless second, the memory holds.
Then the whole scene shudders.
The headlights swell, swallowing the frame of the rear window, and just before impact—before where impact should be—the memory splinters into white. No crash sound, no metal scream. Just absence. A ripped-out strip of film between one breath and the next.
“It’s gone,” I gasp. “It cuts off. Right there.”
Navarro taps the device, and the buzzing slows, then stops. Her office swims back into focus: the plant in the corner, the muted hum of the white-noise machine, the faint trace of someone laughing out by reception. My cheeks are wet. I swipe at them, irritated that my body outran my permission again.
“Let’s ground,” she says gently. “Look around. Name three blue things.”
“Your pen,” I croak. “The mug. That stupid painting.”
“Good,” she says. “Two things you can feel.”
I press my fingers into the couch fabric. “The…upholstery. And the…edges of these.” I lift the pods a little. “They’re hard. And heavier than they look.”
My pulse begins to drop from its sprint. Navarro waits, hands steady on her notebook, pen untouched.
“You want to tell me what you saw?” she asks.
I laugh once, humorless. “Which part?” I ask. “The son asking his mother to drive because he’s ‘done ruining things’? Or the headlights that show up like a third character no one put in the script?”
Micro-hook: I’ve spent months begging for a version of the story where Caleb tried to do better, but I never planned for the cost of believing it.
Navarro nods toward my hands. “Start with sensation,” she says. “We’ll get to interpretation after.”
I talk. Gravel grinding under my feet. The cold bite on my cheeks. The click of his seatbelt, loud in the small car. The tick of the hazards, the feel of the wheel under my palms, the difference in height when I look in the rearview from the driver’s seat instead of the passenger.
When I get to his words, my throat shuts again anyway.
“He said he was done ruining things,” Navarro repeats quietly, after I manage it. “What does that line land on, for you?”
“Every fight we ever had,” I say. “Every time I called him reckless or selfish or…or my mother’s words out of my mouth. Every time I told him he was going to end up killing himself or someone else if he didn’t straighten out.”
My nails dig little crescent moons into my palms. “And then he tries to hand me the wheel,” I add. “And in every official version, he doesn’t get credit for that. He dies as the drunk kid who wrapped his car around a guardrail.”
“In this fragment,” Navarro says, “he chooses to stop. To ask for help. To share control.”
“In this fragment,” I echo. “Which could be a hallucination or an aspiration or a legally disastrous confession.”
She lets that sit. “And the headlights?” she prompts.
“They weren’t there before,” I say. “In my other memory. The one where I grabbed the wheel while he was driving fast. That was just us and the curve and the rail.”
“That earlier memory came up in a different context,” she reminds me. “Different target, different emotional state, different expectations. This one started with gravel and cold and a stopped car.”
“And it stops before we hit anything,” I say. “Before we hit the rail. Before whoever is in that car behind us gets to finish whatever they’re doing.”
The word hangs there—whoever.
Navarro leans forward a little, elbows on her knees. “I’m not going to tell you this is a perfect factual recording,” she says. “But we have an externally verifiable spine now. You told me earlier that the simulation Liam showed you suggests the car shouldn’t have wrapped the way it did without something else in the mix. Ruiz is quietly re-examining for equipment failure. Now your body gives you a memory where you and Caleb are stopped, switching seats, when another vehicle appears behind you.”
“You’re stitching those together,” I say. “Same way Liam does.”
“I’m noticing resonance,” she says. “And I’m reminding you that conflicting fragments don’t automatically mean one is true and the rest are lies. They can all carry pieces of the truth and pieces of your fear.”
“My fear that I failed him,” I say. “That I didn’t stop him. That I made him like this.”
“Your fear that you were the one behind the wheel when the car actually hit,” she adds. “That you ruined things. Your brain may have cast you as the active agent because that horror felt more coherent than being powerless.”
The idea lands in my chest with a dull, stubborn weight. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t erase the deleted texts between him and Tessa, or the booze on his breath, or the secrets in Jonah’s NDA. It does something worse: it suggests he and I tried, and something behind us erased the attempt.
I stare past Navarro’s shoulder, through the glass wall. A car passes on the street below, its headlights streaking across the pane, doubling and tripling in the reflection before dissolving. It feels like watching my own rearview in miniature, safe and terrible at the same time.
“If this fragment is real,” I say slowly, “then the drunk-driving narrative is incomplete.”
“It was incomplete the moment someone edited the bodycam and buried guardrail complaints,” Navarro says. “The question is what you do with new information. And how you hold the possibility that you and Caleb both made different choices in those last minutes than the story credits you with.”
I exhale through my teeth. My hands are still shaking, but not from the machine anymore. “Ruiz is going to want to know about the car behind us,” I say. “About the timing. About when we switched seats.”
“And you can tell him exactly what you told me,” she says. “That you have a sensory-rich fragment of being stopped, switching, and seeing lights. Not that you’re certain, not that it’s the whole picture. Just that your body remembers something your conscious story hasn’t been able to carry.”
Micro-hook: There’s a difference between saying “this happened” and “I remember this,” and I know which sentence defense attorneys will pry apart like a hairline crack in glass.
“Do you think I’m making it up to exonerate him?” I ask. “To exonerate myself?”
Navarro’s gaze is steady. “I think your mind is doing what minds do under trauma,” she says. “Protecting, revising, trying to find a narrative that doesn’t annihilate you. That doesn’t mean this fragment is false. It means we respect it and challenge it at the same time.”
Respect and challenge. Truth and illusion, holding hands.
“Homework?” I ask, because I know she’ll give it anyway.
“Write it,” she says. “Scene only. No analysis. Start from the gravel under your shoes. End at the headlights filling the mirror. Don’t add the crash. Don’t add the aftermath. Let the gap stay a gap.”
I nod, standing on unsteady legs. The room tilts for a second, then rights itself. Outside the office, the hallway glass throws my image back at me twice—front view and ghosted profile—two versions of me walking away with different memories in their pockets.
“Mara,” Navarro says, just before I open the door.
I look back.
“If Caleb said those words to you,” she says, “they matter whether or not the rest of the fragment is perfectly accurate. That intention is real somewhere in all of this, and you don’t have to erase it to make space for other truths.”
My throat tightens again. I nod, once, and escape into the corridor, the sound of the white-noise machine fading behind me.
Outside, the sky hangs low and gray over downtown, the kind of ceiling that presses cars’ headlights on in the middle of the day. I stand by the clinic’s glass front, watching the traffic on the street. Each set of lights approaches, swells in the reflection, and passes. I try to imagine which one is the car that never hit us and which one is the one that did, and my mind refuses to choose.
If Caleb really tried to hand me the wheel that night, then I have to rewrite the sentence I’ve been serving since he died—from negligent mother of a drunk driver to something messier, harder, and infinitely more dangerous: witness to a choice interrupted by someone else’s impact.
I press my palm against the cold glass, watching my own hand blur into the moving light, and realize I have no idea how to tell Ruiz—or myself—where memory ends and collision begins.