“Before or after your parents were killed?” Newan cuts in. No softly, softly approach with that one. She just comes out with it.

“After,” I say.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Yes.”

She gives me a look.

“I’m in my bedroom. I’m in my bed at Charlie’s place.”

“Right. And what happens while you’re in bed at Charlie’s place?”

“I wake up, and there’s a pillow over my face. I can’t breathe.”

Newan nods, passing the Taser from one hand to the other. Shouldn’t she be writing this shit down or something? “And what do you do?” she asks.

“I freak the fuck out. I kick and scramble and fight myself free. I fall out of the bed, and I hug the wall. I see…I see him, then.”

“Him?”

“He says he’s me, a shadow of me, but I know he can’t be. This man is fully grown and smells like bourbon, and I’m small. I’m really small.”

“So you talk to him?”

“He talks to me.”

“Does he say anything else?”

“He tells me he’s going to kill me.”

“And how do you react to that?”

I shoot her an unimpressed look. “Badly.”

“I’m just trying to get a sense of who this version of you is, Zeth. Sometimes our subconscious embodies our secret fears, making us weak in our dreams, stripping us of our power so we feel incapable of protecting or defending ourselves. This often relates to a sense of insecurity we may not even be aware we’re experiencing in our day-to-day lives. And given the life you lead, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s happening with you.”

“That’s not what’s happening with me,” I tell her.

“Oh no? Because you’re invincible, I take it? Because you’re the big, bad Zeth Mayfair and you don’t worry about a fucking thing?”

I laugh at that. She’s doing a relatively good job of hiding it, but I feel like pointing it out—Hey, Doc. Your contempt’s showing. “No. I’m not invincible. And I do worry about things. More and more every fucking day, it seems. I say that’s not what’s happening with me, because it really isn’t. My subconscious doesn’t fuck with what happens in my head when I sleep. It’s more like a broken video recorder. It plays back the same thing on repeat over and over. It replays what actually happened.”

That takes her a second to process. “So this is real? Was real?”

“It was.”

She gives me the cautious look I assume she reserves for all victims of abuse. “And the man, what…does he actually try to kill you?”

I nod. Seems as though my memories are intent on making themselves known—intent on making their displeasure known. I’m not supposed to share this dark, shitty piece of myself with anyone. I am supposed to hide it away and let it fester inside me. Let it rot me from the inside out. I’m hit with the stale smell of alcohol as I think about what I’m going to share with the woman sitting on the other side of the room. I’m hit with the sour tang of body odor and the taste of my own adolescent fear in my mouth. “He comes for me every time. He comes at me with his fists. His skin is slick with sweat, naked—”

“And does he assault you sexually?”

I told Sloane I was never assaulted sexually, and that is the truth. But it’s also true I probably would have been if I hadn’t have fought back so hard. “He was…he was always hard. I could feel his cock against me as he wrestled with me. But I never let him get close enough to do anything.”

“He never touched you?”

I close my eyes. “No.” I was never touched, because I bit, I kicked, I gouged, I fought with every last ounce of strength I had. I fought with the abandon of a person who would rather die than undergo such a humiliation. Young as I was, that was enough. But it didn’t stop the beatings.

“How often did this happen?”

“I don’t know. Every night. Every night for years.”

“But when you dream, it’s always the first time it happened that you relive, correct?”

“Yes.” I already know why that is: the first time was the worst. The first time it happened, I was the youngest I was ever going to be at the hands of the monster that crept into my room each night. And later on I expected it. I knew it was coming, and I was waiting. I was used to beatings, even at that age given my uncle’s proclivity for alcohol abuse and quick fists. But yeah, the first night was different. That first night, in the dark, when the shadowy, naked figure told me he was going to kill me, I heard the intention in his voice and I knew he meant it. I knew I was going to have to fight for my life.

“These aren’t nightmares you suffer from, Zeth,” Newan says. “This is your mind begging for help. Your subconscious is pleading with you, demanding that you deal with the trauma you experienced as a child, because a part of you is still fighting that dark figure inside your head. Even though you’re an adult now and you’re physically strong, every night you’re still affected by this blow-by-blow account of what happened to you because you’ve never felt like you’ve stopped fighting for your life.”

Newan’s words strike a chord somewhere deep down in the very core of me. The idea of it, though—the idea that I’m still a scrawny little fucker, fighting this same damn fight, after so long—is enough to make me feel sick. “So, what are you saying? I need to man up and face this thing head on? What is there to face? I never knew who the guy was. There were always at least twenty or thirty guys hanging around Charlie’s place at night. It could have been any one of them.”