Coming Home (The Santa Monica Trilogy Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

ground rules of confidentiality and respectful listening, and solicited a list of goals and expectations from the participants.
    Toward the end of the ninety minutes, one of the women who had remained silent through most of the session spoke up. Her story was so hauntingly familiar, that Grace felt she was hearing her own trauma retold. The same cycle of intimidation, denial, blaming, coercion, and escalating violence, culminating in a final assault that had sent her fleeing. The identical feelings of guilt, fear, shame, and anxiety.
    Like this patient, Grace had done all the things rape victims were cautioned not to do. She’d washed away the evidence, spent hours scrubbing her skin raw in a futile effort to expunge the memory of the event.
    Later, she rationalized her actions by telling herself that the last thing she needed was to draw additional public scrutiny by reporting Harry to the police. The press was already slavering over his psychiatric history and previous brushes with the law, speculating on his role in the Blackwell scandal, and questioning whether the divorce was merely a legal ploy to hide marital assets from federal investigators.
    She considered herself lucky to have escaped. Fortunate to have been able to arrange a transfer to L.A., where she could finish out her residency in relative peace and safety. She was even grateful for the financial investigation. Anything that placed such onerous burdens on Harry’s time and attention was bound to provide additional protection for her.
    But in the end, she couldn’t outrun the emotions. Couldn’t box them up and shove them in some dark corner of her mind.
    As she sat beneath the fluorescent lights and murmured encouragement in her empathetic therapist’s voice, Grace felt her own pain welling up, like heated water rising through fissures in surrounding rock, building up pressure until it spewed from the earth’s surface as a geyser.
    Later that afternoon, as she emerged from the medical plaza building into the warmth of the afternoon sun, Grace had to stop for a moment and close her eyes.  Behind her, the automatic doors whooshed open and closed, expelling blasts of cooled air.
    Someone jostled her elbow in passing.
    “Are you okay, miss?”
    She glanced at the security guard hovering nearby.
    “Fine, thank you,” she said. Even though she was anything but.
    She started walking, as if putting some physical distance between herself and the scene of such raw emotion would provide some psychological detachment too.
    Wrestling her demons into submission would require more than distance, of course. She knew that despite her best efforts, they might continue dogging her, rearing their ugly heads at the most inappropriate times. In group therapy, when a patient’s experience cut too close to home. On a weekend stroll with an old flame, when he hinted at wanting more than a meal and conversation.
    What she really needed was to regain control. Take concrete steps to close the door on that harrowing chapter of her life and move on.
    The first step was seeing the ob/gyn for a three-month follow-up. In the immediate aftermath of the rape, the one thing Grace had not neglected was post-exposure prophylaxis. With Harry’s track record, she couldn’t be sure of anything, and when it came to her physical health, she wasn’t taking chances. Within seventy-two hours, she’d taken the morning after pill, a cocktail of antibiotics against gonorrhea, chlamydia, and trichomonas, and started on a twenty-eight day course of triple anti-retroviral therapy. Time now for the repeat tests, to make sure the medication had worked.
    As for step two....She still hadn’t called Logan about dinner. She dug out her iPhone and scrolled down until she found his name. Her thumb hovered for several moments in indecision.
    Should she do it?  Could she do it?
    She pressed the green call icon before she lost her nerve.

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Logan sat back and studied Grace across the