The Glimpse Trade (A Silas Sharp Mystery): Chapter 16

 

Chapter 16 — The Therapist’s Dilemma

Dr. Calico Verde had a rule she didn’t tell patients about. It wasn’t in any textbook. It wasn’t taught in graduate school. It was something she learned after years of listening to people explain themselves.

Real pain is messy.

Real trauma wanders. It contradicts itself. It doubles back and argues with its own memory. But rehearsed pain? Rehearsed pain is tidy. Verde sat at her desk with Avery Bloom’s session transcripts spread in front of her like a deck of cards that refused to shuffle. She read them again. Then again. Every time Avery described a difficult moment—an argument, a betrayal, a panic episode—the language was the same. The structure was the same. The emotional beats landed in identical places. There were pauses. But they were the right pauses. There were tears. But they arrived at the right sentences. It felt less like therapy and more like watching someone perform a monologue they’d practiced in the mirror.

Verde leaned back in her chair.

“Interesting,” she murmured.

She pulled another file from the stack: Avery’s biometric summaries from sessions. Heart rate. Breathing patterns. Stress indicators. She frowned. The numbers didn’t match the story. During the supposedly “traumatic” recollections, Avery’s physiology barely moved. Her pulse stayed calm. Her breathing stayed steady. The body wasn’t remembering anything. The body was relaxed.

Verde tapped a pen against the desk.

“Emotional rehearsal,” she said quietly.

People did it sometimes. They repeated a painful story until the narrative felt safe and predictable. It helped them control something that once hurt. But Avery’s case wasn’t that. This wasn’t control. This was optimization. Verde opened her notes and wrote two words across the top of a fresh page:

Narrative Stability

Then she stared at the phrase. Outside her office window, traffic crawled through the late afternoon. A man waited at the crosswalk for the light to change. A woman pushed a stroller past the café on the corner. Life. Unpredictable. Full of friction. Nothing like Avery Bloom’s emotional landscape. Verde flipped back to the transcript from three sessions ago.

“When Bene and I had that fight, I realized conflict can be a growth portal.”

Verde tapped the page. The boyfriend had told Silas they never had that fight. She pulled up the digital calendar. Avery had scheduled that therapy session the morning after the “fight.”

Verde leaned forward slowly.

“Unless…”

She pulled the session audio file and listened again. Avery’s voice was calm. Reflective. Polished. Too polished. Verde stopped the recording halfway through and sat in silence. Then she wrote a second line beneath the first.

Rehearsed emotional events.

Her eyes drifted to the window again.

“What are you doing?” she murmured.

If Avery was rehearsing trauma, there were only two possibilities. Either she was practicing emotional responses to events that might happen…

Or she was remembering events that hadn’t happened yet.

Verde closed the file and rubbed her temple. For the first time since Avery Bloom had become her patient, the therapist felt existentially uneasy. She stared at the transcripts one last time and said aloud to the empty office:

“She’s not anxious,” Calico said aloud. A beat. “She’s optimized.”

Her phone buzzed on the desk. A notification from Avery’s social media feed. Verde glanced at it. A new video.

“How to stay calm during relationship conflict.”

Verde opened the clip. Avery smiled warmly into the camera.

“I used to react emotionally during arguments,” she said. “But now I’ve learned to process conflict in a healthier way.”

Verde felt a chill crawl up her spine. Because the comments below the video were already filling with the same question.

Wait… didn’t you two break up last night?

Verde slowly set the phone down.

And whispered, “That hasn’t happened yet.”

 

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