Paint the town blue

Chapter IV

It's the only day of the week that I'm both looking forward to and afraid of at the same time. Frederic even specifically set aside this day for me as a day off. "You've overworked so much, that I am obliged to give you one more day off per week," he said. Of course, I tried to argue with him, but it seems that he became immune to my indignation, because he just waved a signed order in my face and asked me not to slam the door on the way out. I'm not Kevin to slam the boss's door, so this comparison seemed even kinda funny to me.

Today is the day when I have another appointment with my slightly strange but cool therapist, Valtteri. I still remember how in our first session I couldn't open up and relax in any way, so he quickly found a way to help me with this.

"Tell me a fact."

"About myself?"

"About whatever you want."

"Um... well..."

"Do you want me to tell you one?"

"Yeah, sure."

"I know the average length of a beaver's penis. Exactly to the millimeter. European beaver."

I was so shocked, and I didn't even understand why - because he said it with an extremely unperturbed look, or because I definitely didn't expect...such a fact. When his words finally reached me, I laughed and it really became much easier for me to be present in our sessions.

"Well, what's the length? And how did you figure it out?"

"Oh, are you intrigued?"

"Of course I am."

"I was hunting with friends, we caught a beaver, measured it for fun. And then it's simple: Google and a little fear of being arrested because of their strange search history."

"It's funny, because I'm from the police."

"It's even funnier, because you're the one who has a therapist's appointment."

I thought about Valtteri's words, but he's right here - it was my problems that brought me to him, not his strange browser history that brought him to me. And I don't even know what would be better in such a situation – to sit on the station or in this office? If I think about it, then being both on the station and with a psychotherapist is kinda risky, because there's a risk of going to places that aren't so pleasant – either in a cage with metal bars and a hard bed, or in a place with soft walls.

After that visit, it became much easier for me to open up to this person, but I was still a little afraid to talk about recent events. And now I'm sitting in a chair in a private clinic and waiting for the secretary to call me for another session. I started telling Valtteri about my work and the serial killer case a long time ago, but I hadn't told him yet that the killer was my boyfriend. Although he probably figured it out anyway - my reaction often gives me away. And he probably reads the press, and there they wrote more than once about "a young detective who became an unspoken victim of the amorous charm of a serial killer." Although I tried not to read newspapers with such headlines, and in general I didn't read anything from the yellow press after the trial, but such articles still catch my eye from time to time.

I was looking around the room and noticed familiar faces: a young girl with a tired look, an elderly man with obvious signs of professional burnout, a woman of about 35 y.o., nervously wringing her fingers, a moody boy with his parents. I wonder how they see me from the outside? Nervous? Tired? Broken? Empty? Or all of them together?

The girl is definitely here not for the first time, as well as a man and a woman, but the boy is here for the first time that's for sure. Probably, either there was trouble at school, or his parents got fed up with his antics. There's nothing you can do, because the behavior of children is a direct result of parenting. They raised him that way themselves, now let them fork out for private sessions with expensive doctors.