The psychiatrist watched him for a beat, then nodded. He stuck his head in his office and said a word to the woman, then he returned. “Five minutes.”
“Fine.” Sam turned to a door across the hall and threw it open. He stepped into his office after Cross and closed the door, being careful to turn the lock. “Have a seat.” He said it like an order.
“That’s usually my line.” But Cross sat. “What’s going on?”
Sam went behind his desk and sat, as well. There was no way to handle this, he thought, other than to dive right in. “I’m losing my mind.”
Jared Cross laughed. “My practice is thriving. I ought to start charging more.”
Sam scowled at him, not understanding. He raked his fingers through his hair, agitated.
Cross relaxed, leaning back to rest one ankle on his knee. “Okay. Tell me about your childhood.”
Sam felt his eyes go to slits. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, not entirely. Cooperate with me.”
“Well, I didn’t wet the bed, that’s for sure.”
“You?” Cross shook his head. “No, I can’t imagine that you did.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve led a gilded life.”
Sam thought about it and eased back in his own chair. “Yeah, right.” He shrugged. “What’s to tell? My parents have been married for almost forty-five years. I had dinner there last Sunday. The only thing they said to each other was ‘Pass the salt,’ in the exact same tones they used when I was six.”
“Ah.” Cross steepled his fingers under his chin. “School?”
“Straight A’s, for the most part.”
Cross grinned. “I’ve been your colleague for some time now and I know you’re not that smart.”
Sam relaxed enough to laugh a little. “I did a hell of a lot better with the female teachers, I can tell you that. Is this supposed to give me some insight as to what’s wrong with me?”
“Yes. Because I’m smarter.”
Sam laughed outright. Then Jared got serious.
“Try this on for size. My guess—knowing you as long as I have—is that you learned early on that what you failed to accomplish with your brain, you could always wing on your charm.”
Sam didn’t like the sound of that, but he nodded cautiously. “That’s me. Charming.”
“Personally, I think you rely too much on the knowledge that your looks and your talents of persuasion can get you out of pretty much any sticky situation.”
“People pay you for this?”
“You’ll have my bill in the morning. In the meantime, let’s get back to what I was saying. When you were abducted last week, you ran headfirst into a brick wall. For the first time in your life, you hit up against something you couldn’t finesse your way out of.”
“Correction. I did get us out of it.”
Cross waited.
“Okay, with some help.” And, Sam thought, things had been looking pretty dismal until Tabitha Monroe and Jake White had arrived. Yeah, that bothered him.
“Now you find yourself doubting your every move in areas that had always been your strong suits,” Cross continued.
“Not every move.” Though he’d had a horrible moment in surgery yesterday, Sam thought. What was the sense in denying it? He had asked this guy for help. “Just most of them.”
“It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder,” Cross said.
Sam stiffened. “I don’t do stress and I don’t do disorders.”
“You do now.”
“That’s bull—”
Cross held up a hand to cut him off. “It basically happens when the predictable order of one’s life is suddenly derailed by any sort of catastrophic event. Things you once put trust in are no longer viable. You find yourself reacting differently, in ways you never considered before.”
Sam breathed again. There it was. The answer. That was why he couldn’t get little Nurse Sweetness off his mind. “So give me something for it.”
Cross shook his head. “No can do.”
“Come on, there’s a drug for everything these days. Turn me into me again.”
“You’re a doctor, a surgeon. Kids’ lives depend on you. I’m not prescribing you so much as an aspirin. Besides, it wouldn’t work, anyway.”
There was that, Sam thought, feeling chastened. But he was desperate. “What, then?”
“I want to see you again. Make an appointment this time. We’ll talk our way through it.”
“I’m not going to start seeing a shrink over this.”
“You already have.”
Sam rubbed his jaw. “I’ll think about it.”
Cross stood. “In the meantime, you might want to think about confronting the source of your trauma.”
“Come on, Jared, ‘trauma’ is a little harsh.”
“The scene of the crime, then.”
Sam’s mind flashed immediately to Caitlyn—and what they had done in that basement room. “You can’t be serious.”
Cross gave him an odd look and nodded. “Try visiting the place where it began, where you started realizing you were a day late and a dollar short on saving yourself and Nurse Matthews.”
“The storage room.” Sam breathed again. That he could do. “Why not? It beats the hell out of tangling with little Nurse Prim-and-proper.”
“You seem more focused on your hostage situation than on the actual abduction,” Cross observed. “What exactly happened to the two of you in that underground room, anyway?”
I lost my mind for a woman I never thought I liked, Sam thought, and now she’s metamorphosed on me. “Nothing.”
Cross shrugged. “You’ll tell me. Sooner or later.”
Sam had a staggering thought. “This post-traumatic stress disorder could have happened to Cait, too, right?”
“Cait?”
“Caitlyn. Nurse Matthews.”
Cross fought a grin. “Presumably. If the normal order of her world was rocked.”
“This sort of thing could really change people,” Sam mused.
“It changed you.”
“It’s tripped me up a little, that’s all.”
“You know, after we’re finished with the stress disorder, we can work on your ego problem if you like.”
Sam made a gesture in Cross’s direction to tell him what he thought of that. Then he got to his feet, too. “You’ve already fixed me. Thanks for taking the time.”
“Make an appointment, anyway.”
Sam watched Cross leave the office and he took a deep, steadying breath. It wasn’t him. Well, not entirely. It was Caitlyn, too. She’d gone wacky on him. He was essentially fine.
He had pre-op routines to do on Gilbert. Sam headed for the door. He stepped into the corridor almost squarely into Dr. Kimberlie Leon’s impressive chest.
“Hey there,”