PART 6: Sanctuary of the Clinic
PART 6: Sanctuary of the Clinic
Private clinics offer safe emotional harbors.
We didn't go straight to my apartment.
Instead, Thomas drove us to the downtown medical plaza where my private practice, Vance Pediatric Trauma Center, occupied the entire top floor.
It was nearly 9:00 p.m., and the building was dead silent, bathed in soft, recessed lighting and smelling faintly of lavender and old books.
As we stepped off the private elevator, the familiar, comforting warmth of my office wrapped around me like a weighted blanket.
Rows of psychology textbooks, comfortable velvet armchairs, sand-tray therapy tables, and the colorful drawings gifted to me by young patients lined the walls.
This was my real life.
Not the suffocating, superficial dinner parties in Fairview where women gossiped about country club memberships and men measured their worth by their golf handicaps.
Here, lives were rebuilt. Trauma was healed. Hope was restored.
"Do you want me to order some dinner?" Thomas asked, gently guiding Ava toward her favorite oversized beanbag chair in the corner consultation room, where she immediately curled up with a plush bunny.
"Actually, Thomas, I think I just want a cup of hot chamomile tea and five minutes of absolute silence," I admitted with a soft, weary laugh.
"Consider it done," Thomas said.
He disappeared into the office kitchenette, expertly operating the electric kettle while Lily and Mason quietly settled at the activity table to finish their evening homework.
I walked over to my large mahogany desk, sitting down in my ergonomic leather chair, and unlocked my laptop.
The screen flickered to life, displaying my calendar for the upcoming week.
Tuesdays and Thursdays: full schedules of trauma counseling sessions.
Board meetings with the county hospital administration on Wednesday afternoons.
Consultations with school districts regarding youth mental health initiatives.
I looked at the silver house key I had placed on my desk earlier—the one I had retrieved from my purse before leaving the office this morning, knowing instinctively I wouldn't need it tonight.
Daniel thought I was a dependent housewife who needed his permission to exist.
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In reality, I owned the mortgage on the Fairview house entirely in my own name, funded by the successful sale of my first clinical research startup five years before we even met.
He was the tenant in my life, not the other way around.
