The next day during my lunch hour I find myself somewhere familiar.
The couch in Tiffany’s office has always felt like it belongs in a museum exhibit about what therapy is supposed to look like.
I’m lying on it now, staring at the ceiling while she settles into her chair. The leather creaks softly as she adjusts her position, and I hear the whisper of fabric as she smooths her skirt flat across her lap.
“You haven’t called an emergency session in a while, Austin.”
Her voice has that measured quality it always does. Calm. Patient. Like she’s got all the time in the world and no appointment after this one, which I know isn’t true because I’ve seen her calendar.
“Yeah, well.” I shift on the couch. “There’s been a development I wanted to run by you.”
She doesn’t say anything. Just waits.
“I had a pretty bad hallucination yesterday.”
“That’s to be expected,” she says. “You’ve been off your antipsychotics for some time now. We discussed this as a likely outcome.”
“Right. Yeah. I know.” I fold my hands on my stomach. “But this one told me to kill myself.”
“Oh?” Her tone stays level. “What happened?”
“So I moved into that house I told you about. The haunted one. Four hundred a month, water included, whole deal.” I’m talking faster now. “And I was talking to the ghost. Nicole. Well, not talking to her exactly, more like I was having this hallucination where she was messaging me on some AOL chat thing. And I kind of ticked her off by commenting on her room, and then she told me I should kill myself.”
“Mhm.”
I can hear her pen moving across paper. She’s taking notes. She always takes notes.
“And I figure,” I continue, “if my mind is telling me to kill myself, that’s probably a thing I should mention to you. Right? Like, if she told me that, it makes me nervous that some part of myself is feeling that way.”
The pen stops.
“Do you feel suicidal, Austin?”
I laugh. It comes out more like a breath. “Honestly? No. Not at all. I feel fine. Great, even. I’ve got my own place, I’m managing the voices okay, work is good. I’m not in crisis or anything like that.”
“Did the message bother you?”
I think about that for a second. “Only in the sense that I don’t want to discover I’m secretly depressed and just haven’t noticed yet. Like if my brain is throwing that out there, maybe it knows something I don’t.”
She smiles. Not big, just a small shift at the corners of her mouth. “You don’t seem depressed to me, Austin. You seem happy.”
The tension in my shoulders eases a little. “Thank you.”
“Let me ask you this.” The pen taps once against her notepad. “Did it make sense in the context of her other messages? When she said it?”
“Oh, absolutely. She’d been telling me to get out, saying she hated me, threatening to kill me. The suicide thing was just the next escalation in that pattern.”
“So your brain wasn’t trying to tell you a secret,” Tiffany says. “It was simply playing a character. A role. The hallucination was being consistent with itself.” She sets the pen down. “I wouldn’t think twice about it.”
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Okay. Good. So I’m safe to stay off the meds, because if I should go back on them I’m…”
“Do you want to go back to having seizures?”
“No. No, definitely not.” I shake my head against the leather cushion. “Maria would kill me if I tried to live alone while having seizures. She was already pissed that I left.”
Tiffany makes a small sound that might be amusement. “Your sister cares about you very much.”
“I know.”
“Do you still feel like a burden to her?”
I don’t answer right away. The question sits there in the air between us.
“Yeah,” I say finally. “I mean, I told you that’s why I was so gung ho about leaving her house in the first place. I wanted to stop leeching off her. She deserves to have a life of her own instead of worrying about me all the time.”
“It’s good to be independent,” Tiffany says.
“Yeah.”
She watches me quietly, letting the silence settle.
“Did you see the ghost?” Tiffany asks.
The shift in topic catches me off guard. I blink at the ceiling.
“I saw her in a dream two nights ago.”
“What did she look like?”
I close my eyes, pulling up the memory. The purple walls. The carved words. The corner where she’d been sitting.
“Pale,” I say. “Like bright, glowing white skin. Black hair, straight, hanging over her face. She was wearing a flannel shirt.” I pause. “And her eyes were pure white.”
“Anything else?”
I feel my face heat up a little. “She was, uh. She was wicked busty.”
Tiffany doesn’t react to that, maintaining steady eye contact.
“You always bring up your hallucinations’ breast size, don’t you?” Tiffany says. There’s a teasing edge to her voice that wasn’t there a second ago.
I open my eyes and look at her. “You told me to always make sure I tell you what my brain locks onto. Visual details, specifics, all that.”
“Of course, Austin.”
She shifts in her chair, and her hand moves to adjust the collar of her shirt. She doesn’t unbutton anything, but the way she tugs at the fabric makes the neckline sit differently. The cleavage that was already visible becomes more noticeable.
“I hope I’m not distracting you,” she says.
I sit up on the couch and look at her directly. “That’s very unprofessional of you.”
Her mouth curves into a smirk. “I can’t tease you a little bit? I’ve worked with you for years.”
A laugh escapes before I can stop it. “Don’t most patients want to sleep with their therapist?”
“Most?” Her eyebrows lift slightly. “That’s quite the assumption you’re making.”
“I mean statistically…”
“Statistically,” she interrupts, “most patients are too busy working through their issues to fantasize about their therapist.” She taps her fingers lightly against the armrest. “Are you fantasizing about me, Austin?”
I’m already standing up before she finishes the question.
“Alright, if I’m not suicidal, I’m leaving.”
She tilts her head slightly, her expression shifting into a look I can’t quite read. “That’s so unlike you to avoid a question. You’re usually so eager to talk with me.”
“Yeah.” I reach into my back pocket and pull out two twenties, folding them once before holding them out to her. “Here’s my copay.”
She waves it off without even looking at the bills. “No, it’s okay.”
“But you helped me.” I’m still holding the money out, arm extended across the space between us. “That’s what I pay you for.”
“Today’s free of charge.” She gestures toward the door with deliberate care. “You didn’t even come close to your full hour. Plus it would almost feel like prostitution if I took it now.”
The joke lands in the room between us. I can see the amusement in her eyes, waiting to see how I’ll react.
I shove the money back into my pocket. “Whatever.”
I grab my jacket from the arm of the couch and sling it over my shoulder.
“I’ll see you on Friday,” I say.
“See you then, Austin.”
Tiffany: