Counting To Fifteen [Grey's Anatomy]

chapter twenty three - flu vaccines & litter boxes

Daisy was incredibly used to the whole psychiatry thing by the time January rolled around.

She was used to the prying and the regressing back in time and such.

Daisy had yet to use the box of tissues on Dr. Sen's desk, and she took that as a personal accomplishment. Daisy didn't want to cry in front of Dr. Sen, she knew that would fatally mortify her.

Some days Daisy talked about Mom, and that made her want to cry, but she never did.

Some days Daisy talked about Dad, and that made her want to cry, but she never did.

Today, Dr. Sen had decided that he wanted to deep dive into Daisy's time with the Walters. That didn't make Daisy want to cry, it just made her want to curl up in a ball and hide from the rest of the world.

"So it was ten months with the Walters?" Dr. Sen asked, wanting to confirm the information he thought he had been given earlier.

Daisy nodded slowly. It was ten horrific and agonizingly slow months, from last August just up until this past June. It hadn't even been a year since the girls had been away from the Walters, and each event was burned so clearly into Daisy's mind

Ironically, their foster placements prior to the Walters had never gone farther than six months. Of course their most abusive and traumatizing placement would turn out to be the longest.

"Could you tell me about that?"

Daisy winced, feeling a little uneasy. Her brain was constantly plagued with thoughts of the Walters. But putting those thoughts into words? Daisy was positive that would send her into a breakdown.

"I don't really want to."

"That's okay." Dr. Sen nodded understandingly. He still wanted to get a little bit more information out of her, though. "What about just the basics? Do you remember their names?"

"It was, um...Violet and Chris." Daisy recalled softly, her eyebrows furrowing. Mr. Walter had demanded the girls only ever call him by his surname, it felt so foreign to speak his first name out loud.

"Violet." Dr. Sen echoed as he frowned, a tidbit of information pulling at the back of his brain. "Isn't that your sister's name?"

Daisy nodded slowly.

"Is there any connection there?" Dr. Sen questioned. "Between Mrs. Walter and your sister deciding to go by a different name?"

Daisy frowned at that, slowly nodding again. She didn't want her brain to take her back to everything, but of course she never had any choice over what her brain did to her.

Violet Walter was a cowardly woman. Even though she never hit the girls like Mr. Walter had, Daisy hated her just as equally as her husband.

The woman watched her husband torment the girls, and she never said a word.

Daisy would forever wonder why Mrs. Walter never stepped in to protect the girls, or why she didn't call their social worker.

It probably had something to do with not wanting to get her husband into any legal trouble. But Mrs. Walter seriously couldn't have asked her husband to stop it? She couldn't have at least tried to act like she was concerned?

She was the biggest coward, and nobody hated cowards more than Calypso.

Calypso's first ever big girl decision was deciding to go by her middle name instead of her first name.

She'd made tons of decisions before, of course. But as a six-year-old, those decisions primarily consisted of which ice cream flavor to choose or which color crayon to use for her drawings.