Page 24 of Dissonance

“Busy can be good,” she muses, pen moving across a fresh page. “Work kept you on the move?”

I nod, push off the wall, and head toward the long cream sofa opposite her. The frame creaks under my weight as I sit forward, elbows on my knees, hands clasped. She notes my posture without commenting on it, something I’ve always appreciated about Joanne.

“We were in LA,” I offer, not elaborating.

“Awards season, right?” she asks. “And how’s that for you? When things get loud for him around this time of year?”

I shrug, the movement small. “It’s the job. Noise doesn’t bother me.”

She lets the quiet sit, giving me room to say more. I don’t. My gaze moves around her office, the framed doctorates on the wall, the plants arranged to make the space feel less clinical, more human.

“This time of year tends to be heavier for you,” she says eventually, when the silence has stretched long enough. “Regardless of how busy Reign’s schedule keeps you.”

“Just another day.”

The discomfort at the back of my neck says otherwise, but I’ve gotten good at not showing when that happens. Keep still, give nothing away, let it pass. What Joanne would probably say is that’s exactly the problem.

“Some memories have a way of making themselves known around anniversaries,” she says gently, crossing one leg over the other.

“I’ll be fine.”

She lets that linger too, her pen going still.

“When Calum comes to mind, what’s the first thing you think of?”

I exhale slowly, hand dragging across my jaw. This specific session—the one that falls every year around this time—always fucking sucks. Not because talking helps less than it used to. Because it still isn’t enough. Being in this room won’t change what happened, won’t change the thoughts that follow every time I think about him, anniversary or not.

I couldn’t save him.

“Depends what you mean.”

She doesn’t take the deflection, just smiles, patient as ever. “Whatever comes up first. No pressure.”

Images of Cal flash through my mind with an uninvited clarity that nearly steals my breath. Blond hair catching the sun in the yard outside our house growing up. Feet too big for the rest of his pre-teen body. The look on his face the day I told him I’d enlisted and was leaving. Him at sixteen, scowling in the passenger seat while I was home on leave, until I handed him the keys and promised I’d teach him to drive.

The phone call. Always the phone call, waiting at the end of it. Everything I thought I understood about keeping people safe rearranged itself in the span of a single minute.

I shut the door on that memory before it can fully open. But thirteen years later, it still takes the same effort. That’s the thing nobody warns you about grief; it doesn’t get lighter. You just get better at pretending it has.

“A kid,” I say finally, my voice a rasp.

She gives a small nod. “That makes sense. A lot of people find their loved ones stay frozen at a particular age.”

Maybe for them. But Calum isn’t frozen in my memory because my brain won’t move on. He was a kid. Not even twenty. When he died, I was twenty-seven, and he’d barely started living.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s math.

“And your father?” She eases into it. “Have you spoken with him lately?”

I glance at the clock pinned to the wall behind her. “I see him when I can.”

“When you’re not with Cooper?” Her pen moves over the page again. “And Archie? Any thought of going back to Scotland for a while?”

“He’s got his own life. The estate keeps him busy.”

“And you?”

I don’t know what she wants from me. It’s always the same answer. “I’ve got work.”