Dr. White made a note on the pad of paper on his desk. “Do you remember the last time you spoke with Mr. White?” he asked.
I thought back. “Last week,” I said. “It was our final meeting before graduation. He wished me luck, and gave me the letter of recommendation for my summer job he’d promised me.”
Dr. White paused in his scribbling to look up at me again with those wide, disbelieving eyes. “Do you remember the last thing he said to you, Amber?”
I thought back again and laughed at the memory.
“Yeah, he said, ‘See you around campus, Miss Jung.’ I want to study psychiatry, and Mr. White gave me that nickname because I’ve been reading up on Carl Jung and I think he was amazing. Mr. White is a Freudian, and he likes to debate me about whose theories are truer. Anyway, he’s going back to school for his doctorate next year, so maybe we’ll run into each other.”
Dr. White set his pen on the tablet and stared at the woman behind me. I turned to look back at her and she appeared puzzled.
“Amber,” Dr. White said, calling my attention back to him, “I want to take you forward to today. Do you remember what happened?”
I turned back around. “Today?”
“Yes. Specifically, tonight. Take me through the hours between six and nine P.M. What was going on?”
A rush of memories flooded me, and it was like being doused with a bucket of cold water. “Spence…” I whispered. “Ohmigod…Spence!”
“Amber,” Dr. White said sharply. “No matter what you remember, you will feel calm and relaxed. No matter how upsetting the memory, you will breathe deeply and feel no fear. All tension will leave you, and you’ll feel like you’re floating in a calm, safe place. Okay?”
The icy panic left me, just like that, and I felt calm, centered, and light as air. “Okay,” I told him.
“Excellent. Now, tell me what happened between six and nine on May twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty-seven.”
“I was in my bedroom, waiting…” I began.
“Waiting for what?”
I blinked sleepily. “Waiting for Momma and Daddy to leave. Waiting for…”
“What?”
I closed my eyes. The sensation of floating weightlessly was very intense. It was making me drowsy. “For the end. For death to find me.”
“For death to find you?” he repeated. “Or the other way around?”
The irony brought a tiny smile to my lips. “A little of both. I knew it’d come. But I didn’t know how it would happen until I saw the knife.” I put my hand over my heart; the wound still burned.
“Did you take it from the kitchen?” he asked me. “Did you use a blade from the knife block?”
“Did…I?” I said, confused. “No. No, not me. Not me. I wasn’t brave enough to do it. I didn’t know how else to get to Spence, so I set it up so that everything would be taken care of. Otherwise, it all would’ve come undone.”
“Amber, please explain what you mean by that,” said Dr. White.
I let out a long breath, that floating feeling was intensifying, and I felt so tired. So sleepy. And yet, I still had enough awareness to be wary of his questions. So many secrets I needed to keep.
“It’s not important,” I told him.
There was a lengthy pause, and then Dr. White said, “Did you kill yourself, Amber? Did you use the knife to kill yourself? Your parents will want to know: Was it your doing?”
I opened my eyes; his question had jarred me back for a moment. It’d never occurred to me that my parents would think I’d killed myself. “No! Do they think that’s what happened?”
“Many people do,” Dr. White told me.
That made me angry. “I didn’t,” I assured him.
“Did you kill your boyfriend?” he asked me next. “Did you kill Ben Spencer, Amber?”
I actually laughed. Was he kidding? “Did I…?” And then I realized he was quite serious. “I could never hurt Spence,” I told him. “Never.”
“Then what happened, Amber? Tell me, and I’ll let everyone else know.”
I sank wearily back in the chair. I felt like I was drifting farther and farther away from Dr. White and this room. It was like being sucked backward by an unseen and powerful force. I had to focus very hard simply to talk.
“Let them know it wasn’t me,” I managed to say. “Tell Momma and Daddy it wasn’t me. Tell them that it was very fast. The pain didn’t last long.”
“Amber, they’ll want to know who was responsible,” Dr. White said. “Tell me who it was who murdered you so that I can tell them.”
I shook my head and sank back into the chair, closing my eyes and drifting further and further away. “I’m so tired,” I said. “I’m so tired….”
“Amber,” Dr. White called to me, his voice urgent. Insistent. “Do you know who Lily Bennett is?”
A wave of awareness came over me, and a flood of memories formed instantly in my mind. Memories that weren’t my own, and yet were. It was as if I’d teleported through time and suddenly remembered that I was someone else entirely. Someone without the memories I had. Someone vulnerable.