The next day, Lewis brought home a woman he introduced as Melody Reyes, a psychologist. I'd spent years in therapy before, so I knew how these sessions worked — knew the soft voice and the careful questions, the way silence was used as a tool, the way every word was chosen to make you feel held rather than studied. I didn't push her away. I was carrying our pups now, and medication wasn't something I could risk. I had to find another way through whatever this was.
But this felt different from anything I'd dealt with before. Back then, I had lost the will to fight, to breathe, to stay. The darkness had been a kind of stillness, a slow withdrawal from everything. Now it was the opposite — every instinct in me screamed to survive, to protect what was growing inside me, to claw my way back to the surface no matter what it cost. Yet my body kept slipping out of my reach, like something else had quietly taken the wheel while I wasn't looking, steering me somewhere I hadn't chosen to go.
