Chapter Text
Here are the facts, in clinical order, because that is how Sam Parker processes things and she has made her peace with this.
She is thirty-eight years old. She has a PhD in clinical psychology from a university that sends her alumni fundraising emails she deletes with the efficiency of someone who paid enough for that degree already, thank you. She is licensed in three states, which sounds impressive until you learn that one of those states is largely because she took the exam when she was bored. She works for a telehealth platform called ClearPath Wellness, which she joined for the flexibility and stayed with because it turns out that seeing clients in your pajama pants from the waist down is, genuinely, one of the better working conditions she's ever had.
She lives alone in an apartment in Grampleton that has good light in the mornings.
She has been saying this— the good light thing— since September, when she moved in, and she would like the record to show that she is aware it sounds like something a person says when they are working very hard to find something positive to say about their apartment. She would also like the record to show that the light is genuinely good. These two things are not mutually exclusive. She is a therapist. She understands that.
The reading chair is the color of old mustard and it looks slightly wrong in the apartment and she bought it specifically because it was what she would have wanted before she started compromising on chairs, which was, she now understands, not really about chairs. She sits in it every morning and drinks her coffee and reminds herself that she likes it. The chair. The apartment. The good light. The life.
She is working on that last one.
She got into psychology because she was the kid who always wanted to know what people meant. Not what they said — what they meant.
She grew up in a house where her mother said I'm not angry in a tone that could strip paint. Where her father said we'll see about every future thing until the future became a place Sam stopped trying to visit. By the time she was twelve she could tell you exactly what everyone at the dinner table actually wanted and had decided not to say out loud.
Her therapist at the time — yes, she had a therapist at twelve, she grew up in Grampleton, everyone had a therapist, it was practically a municipal service — called this a gift. Her mother called it exhausting. Her father said we'll see.
She does not currently have a therapist. She has a waiting list of her own clients, a colleague named Marcus she can consult with, and a best friend named Renee who is going through something with her sister. Sam is aware that none of these things are the same as having a therapist. She is, as previously noted, working on it.
The marriage.
Okay.
The marriage lasted six years and ended, like most things that end, not all at once but incrementally, the way a plant dies when you forget to water it — not a dramatic wilting, just a slow and then suddenly very obvious decline. Daniel was kind. Daniel was patient. Daniel made elaborate things on weekends and always cleaned up after himself, which Sam had found attractive in her thirties in the way that you find things attractive when you've spent enough time with people who don't clean up after themselves.
He also said, in year five, during what Sam would document in her own file — if she had a file, which she should, which is a separate issue — as termination of primary relationship: I feel like one of your clients.
This is the sentence that lives rent-free in the apartment of Sam's brain. It has been there for eight months. It has not paid a single month's rent. She has thought about evicting it and has not gotten around to it, mostly because she suspects it's right about something she hasn't finished figuring out yet.
She said, at the time: that's not fair.
She has since revised this to: that was probably fair.
She has not yet revised it to: that was fair and here is what I am going to do about it, but she is a work in progress. As she would tell any client who needed to hear it. She would just prefer, if possible, to not be the one who needs to hear it.
She moved out in August. She took the cast iron pan, the good coffee maker, half the books, and one piece of art that had been hers before it was theirs — a small print of a canal that she'd bought years ago because it was ugly in a way she found comforting, which tells you everything you need to know about Sam Parker and nothing she would tell you herself.
She told three people. Renee got the full version. Marcus got the professional version. Her mother got two sentences and a subject change so elegant she's still a little proud of it.
She did not— and she wants to be very clear that she knows this, she is not oblivious— she did not take on four new clients in the following month because she needed to not think about it. She took on four new clients because September is always busy and she had availability and the waiting list does not manage itself.
The waiting list does not manage itself.
She took on four new clients because September is busy.
Moving on.
The telehealth platform works like this: clients in need of mental health support log on, create a profile, get matched with a provider based on specialty and availability and insurance. The platform is clean and functional and the branding is a shade of blue specifically engineered to communicate calm, trustworthy, not a scam. Sam's profile says she specializes in depression, anxiety, life transitions, and relationship difficulties.
She did not write that last one with any awareness of irony.
She would like, for the third time, to make that very clear.
The thing about Pelican Town is that Sam didn't notice it at first. You don't, when you're onboarding clients — you see names, presenting concerns, insurance information, the checkbox answers to intake questions that tell you a little about what someone is willing to say and a lot about what they're not. Location is just a field in a form.
But after a few months she started to notice: Pelican Town, Pelican Town, Pelican Town. A cluster of people in a small coastal community who had, one by one, found their way to ClearPath Wellness and, specifically, to her. She'd looked it up eventually — population somewhere under forty, the kind of town that shows up on one of those hidden gems of the coast travel blogs and then is immediately ruined by people who read hidden gem travel blogs.
She does not know, yet, that her clients there know each other.
She does not know, yet, that they've had conversations about each other that they've also had, separately and confidentially, with her.
She does not know, yet, what it means to hold all of that.
What she knows is this: on Monday mornings she makes coffee in the good machine and sits in the chair that looks slightly wrong and opens her calendar and thinks, okay, let's see who needs what today. It's a reflex as natural as breathing. Taking care of people. Making room for whatever they bring.
She's very good at it.
She is, in fact, considerably better at it for other people than she is for herself, but that's not something she's looking at directly yet.
She's getting there.
Probably.
We'll see.