Just a Dare

Chapter Twenty-Six

"That," she said, sighing before taking off her glasses and carefully folding them to place on my desk not looking up to make eye contact, "would be me."

I kept my face neutral as I merely nodded and wrote it down. "And this relative of Grey's is his...?"

"Mother," she supplied, her eyes flickering up to meet mine briefly before training themselves back on her neatly folded glasses again.

I scribbled it down on the next line before looking over at the paper again to see what age David Grey was and letting out a low whistle. "Fifteen years old," I murmured, shaking my head in disbelief before writing that down, too.

This was going to be a touchy subject with her, I could just tell. The Melody Scribner I had known in high school got attached to people very easily, so the fact that he was so young had to have taken some sort of toll on her.

After I'd finished, I looked back up and told her in the most businesslike tone I could manage once we'd locked eyes again, "I understand that you are bound by law not to disclose any information about your sessions with any of your clients, but I'm going to need you to tell me about him and his mom so that I get an idea of what we're up against."

She looked down at her lap and it was quiet for a few minutes before Melody said, "He started seeing me about eight months ago because he was depressed."

Depression, I wrote.

"David was...he was a troubled guy at first." She said. "He was angry at the world for his dad's death."

It was hard for me not to feel something for this kid. I had been exactly where Mel was describing when mine had fallen into a coma. I had been furious with life and God because I knew then that he was gone. I missed my father, some days more than others, but I had gone through the real stages of grief years before they finally pulled the plug on him. By the time senior year came around, I remember desperately trying to hold onto the idea that he was going to magically wake up one day and life would return to normal, but I had known in my heart as much as I tried to deny it that he never would.

He was gone the moment he started having that seizure freshman year and I had known that all along, although sometimes I liked to think that he could hear my explanations of my day during my frequent visits to see him. It made it easier to move on with my life knowing that he had heard at least one of my apologies. I felt a pang in my chest and my hand stilled for a moment as I waited for the pain to pass.

I had grown a lot in the past ten years. After watching that plane fly away, I had been more grief-stricken than I had been in a while. If it wasn't a wave of hurt that washed over me caused by Mel's departure, it was a memory of Rob or my dad that bombarded me and paralyzed me. I could hardly get out of bed for the first couple of weeks and it still made me feel unbelievably guilty to think about the handful of times during that time that my mom had no choice but to pry my mouth open and force feed me because I had been so depressed that I refused to eat.

After about a month of wallowing in self-pity, I finally got out of bed and took a shower. I wordlessly went through my day, but I was at least trying and I knew my mom could see that. I started talking a little more every day as the emotional turmoil raging inside of me started to calm down and after two weeks I was back to normal again.

During that long month of self-induced vegetation, I had a lot of time to reflect on everything that had happened. I lingered on many of the things Mel had been telling me from the very beginning of our friendship that I'd refused to accept until then. I thought about her insistence that dad's death really hadn't been my fault. He had been sick for a long time. I'd heard, although I'd vainly tried to blot it out from my memory, the doctors telling my mom multiple times in the months leading up to that night that it was only a matter of time.