Quick note: this one goes out to my hubby –he's a shrink, guess I already told ya that- who assisted me and simulated an entire therapy session for this chapter until we basically ended up roleplaying the entirety of this chapter over and over again until I felt it was worth posting and he felt satisfied with the physiological aspects and developments of the dialogue between Nathan and his therapist. Not only it was fun to do, but also his professional insight helped me lots so… thanks a bunch, tall, dark-haired Welsh man that lives with me.

Also, sorry in advance if this chapter seems dense (or denser than usual): since it's a therapy session, it's not meant to progress linearly but to go back and forth, and back and forth, back, back, zig-zag, forth, and so on.

Besides, chapter 50, wtf?! How did I get here?

Interlude

La Mala Sangre

(The blood gone bad)

"1-

Let me introduce myself. I am… and so on and so forth. Now you know more about me than I know about you.

2-

I am setting out from the meeting with what I am, with what I now begin to be, my descendant and my ancestor, my father and my son, my unlike likeness.

Though I am reaching over hundreds of years as if they did not exist, imagining you at this moment trying to imagine me, and proving finally that imagination accomplishes more than history, you know me better than I know you. Maybe my voice is dim as it reaches over so many years, so many that they seem one long blur erased and joined by events and lives that become one event, one life; even so, my voice is sufficient to make The Monument out of this moment."

Mark Strand – The Monument

His wife was worried about him. And he was fed up with her.

Her concern, albeit genuine, was asphyxiating. Her love had gone bad lately, or at least that's what he would tell himself. Everything had changed after visiting the cemetery: the eyes he had seen; such color; he could recognize that particular shade of coffee anywhere. His wife's affection, the tender love that had helped him back then was now his personal prison. Even when they had been together for several years now, the man had finally acknowledged his complete lack of freedom only recently. Right after the cemetery. Right after those eyes.

Everything changed in the cemetery. Everything.

His children had now become the guardians of the prison he had built all around him the second he married that woman. He had felt it right there, right in front of that grave, when the warmth of his son's embrace quickly became fire in his arms. Then he had covered the kid's face as if trying to protect him from the disturbing specters blocking the way. He had only covered his son's eyes to prevent the boy from seeing the face of the woman that should have been his mother; he had only covered his son's eyes as a way to avoid the subsequent comparison between that foreign beauty that was his no more and the mundanity of the woman waiting for them in the car.

If you could only picture this as a garden, boy… a beautiful meadow in bloom that quickly becomes a muddy, broken valley.

Your eyes gave you away.

"Why are you here, Nathan?" The therapist asked. "What is making you come to see me this late at night?"

Your eyes gave you away but don't get me wrong, kid; it wasn't just the color. I see in your eyes the same evil that defines my own sight; my ridiculous nature, my viciously colored world.

Nathan rearranged his green tie and looked out the window, breathing out loudly.

She once said to me that there's no such thing as inherited evil but now that I can finally look at you and see you as you are, I have to admit that she was scandalously wrong. I still am my father's son; I am the flesh of his flesh and the sin of his sins. Just as you are the flesh of my flesh, and the sin of my sins.

He hated to be the one that calls long after the day is over; the one that calls when working hours are obsolete, already existing in the past tense. But it all had started with a call. Or two calls, to be exact.

He was driving home when his cell phone rang. At first, he thought his secretary was calling him because he had forgotten something at the office. He cursed under his breath before answering; he had told her many times not to call him outside his working hours unless it was an emergency.

In a way, it was.

Nathan's secretary, Vivian, told him that a woman named Lily had tried to contact him but when informed that he had already left the building for the day, the woman decided to leave a message for him. Now Vivian was calling him to tell him that this woman had said that she was sorry, that their unexpected encounter had shaken her.

"Tell him it wasn't my intention to sound rude or uncaring… His visit sort of startled me, that's all. I understand he has a family now; I wasn't trying to bring him down with all those memories…"

"So… Nathan, what's going on?" The therapist insisted.

Lily.

Lily Flynn.

"I received a phone call yesterday," he began, eyes distant and absorbed in the starry night outside the window. "My secretary told me that Alex's cousin was sorry, that my visit had surprised her."

The therapist folded his arms over his chest.

"Why did you visit her?"

"That's the point," Nathan sentenced, his irises finally finding the middle-aged man observing him at the other side of the room. "I didn't."

The man stood up and leaned his body on the doorframe just as Nathan turned around and shifted position on the burgundy divan. Then he buried his hands inside his pockets, as if searching for warmth.

"Alexandra belongs in a pleasant past, Nathan; a past you tried very hard to cling on to for the longest time. When her memory became too painful for you to bear you simply detached yourself from it… But it is completely understandable, now that you just lost your father, that you would try to find that past again." Words seemed fragile and obvious as if the doctor wasn't trying to help at all. An evident gesture of disgust took over Nathan's face: he didn't want to be reminded of those that were his no more. He didn't want the conversation to go that way.

"Alexandra also represents a time when things were easier for your family."

The young CEO averted his eyes – he couldn't dare to take a look inside those irises about to deconstruct his sanity.

"Your parents were divorced, but they could still coexist in a rather peaceful manner. Your father was healthy. Your brother was still there for you; the conflict between the two of you did not exist back then. You were a happy young man, Nathan. You had a beautiful woman by your side and a bright future ahead of you. You were spoiled, young, rich and carefree – and deeply loved… You had it all."

"This has nothing to do with my father," Nathan cut him off abruptly. "I went to the cemetery because I thought… because I felt that call was some sort of sign…"

Now it was the therapist's turn to interrupt the words he was hearing.

"You went to the cemetery," the middle-aged man began, his brow furrowed, his diction slow and careful, "looking for a sign, you say. A sign of what?"

Silence.

"What did you want to find there, Nathan?" The professional pushed him. "What were you expecting to find?"

More silence.

"Are you scared?" The therapist asked him after a while, a certain sense of honesty was laced in his voice even when he was trying his best to act professionally. It came with the job, he recognized after so many years of treating the same patient; it was inevitable to bond, even if they weren't friends, even if they were never going to be friends. Still, it was easy for the doctor to sympathize with someone like Nathan: a strong, privileged man who had suffered more than enough.

Nathan's case was one of his personal favorites.

Nathan was complex and twisted. There was a defying darkness, innate and latent, inside of him. A darkness that had covered him one day, the day Alex went missing; a darkness that still today refused to let him go. When Nathan looked out the window and sighed somberly, the doctor pressed on.

"Do you fear the future, Nathan?"

The CEO laughed briefly but his smile never reached his eyes.

"I don't know anymore."

"What do you mean?"

He shrugged his shoulders. Even when the answers seemed way too obvious for him to say the words out loud, he knew the man would not stop unless he spoke every last one of them. "I haven't felt fear in a very long time. A very long time."

Kano had killed his fears. All of them. One by one.

"Why is that?"

"Because when my father got sick, I knew he was gonna die. And when my brother left, I knew he was not coming back. When Loraine told me she was pregnant, I knew the dream of finding Alex was over…" he paused, reaching inside his pocket for his pack of cigarettes. Fingers held on to the tiny box, scrunching it up nervously. "I should have known when she disappeared, that she wouldn't be back. Everything's always been so final for me, so definitive."

"Do you fear loneliness?"

With a guffaw, the CEO folded his arms over his chest again.

"How can I be afraid of loneliness? I'm never alone, I'm never fucking alone."

As the professional nodded pensively, Nathan inspected his cigarettes: loose tobacco was escaping through the cracks in the paper – he had ruined the entire pack.

"Do you want to be left alone? Do you pursue loneliness?"

"And who doesn't?" Nathan replied harshly, sitting up in the divan and bringing his hands to his temples. "You work all day in a building filled with incompetent morons, then you go back home and you have to listen to your wife and your children." He stopped all of a sudden, as soon as he sensed the ungratefulness he was imprinting in his words. "It's not that I don't love them," he was almost pleading now, looking at the other man right in the eye, "I love my kids, you know I do."

The therapist let his pen rest on top of the papers neatly arranged on his large, wooden desk. Then he turned around slowly and opened the window.

"I am not here to judge you, Nathan, I thought you already knew that."

He observed the destroyed cigarettes resting on the palm of Nathan's hand, then his eyes traveled up, way beyond the bookshelf on the other side of the room until they stopped right above the door. The doctor sighed, not ready to get lost inside the labyrinth of emotions that Nathan had crafted for himself.

"Then why did you go to the cemetery? What were you searching for?" His eyes found Nathan's staring back at him; hungrily, impatiently. "It was your first time there, wasn't it?"

Nathan nodded in silence.

"I thought it was a sign. I thought… I said, Ok, I didn't visit her cousin, I don't even know why this woman is calling me now but maybe it's like an old debt I'm supposed to pay; maybe I should just go visit them," he stuttered, "visit her." He stood up, sweaty palms resting at the sides of his legs, then he sat back down, confused. "There is a nameplate, you know? Between her parents' nameplates, there's her nameplate. No date, just her name."

"And how did it make you feel? Seeing her nameplate for the very first time," the therapist asked.

"Unworthy."

The peculiar word startled the professional. His surprise was evident: Nathan was inches away from reentering depression.

"It's like… it's so easy," Nathan began, eyes tearing up. "We don't know what happened to her, so we just assume she's dead. And we bury her, symbolically of course, but we don't write dates as if there's no need for details. And here I am, with my son, standing right in front of her nameplate and saying my goodbyes as if she was actually there… but I don't talk to my boy, I don't explain to him who she was or why she was important to me. It's like we all are taking everything for granted; it's like we don't give a crap anymore. It's really pathetic, you know? I bring my son to the cemetery with me because the moment's important, because I want him there with me and then…"

"And then what?"

"And then it fades away. Waiting for us in the car, there's the woman I never wanted to marry. In front of me, the only woman I ever loved is… but at the same time, she isn't. I guess that's the point. She still isn't. Her parents are gone, our whole world is gone and we just… we just clapped our hands in the end, choosing the simple way out. I married another woman because it was easier and we put a nameplate for her there, because it was…"

"Healthier," the doctor corrected him. "You married another woman because it was healthier."

Nathan didn't correct the man. He had told him many things about himself, and he had always been sincere. But there were other truths he had chosen not to share. His relationship with his wife had been doomed from the start. When they first met, he was already corrupted by Kano's obscurity - she never had an actual chance of meeting the real Nathan; the original Nathan had disappeared with Alexandra.

Healthier was not the right word, then.

Wiser.

He had married another woman because it was the wisest thing to do… And because she was pregnant with his child, just like his father had married his mother way back then, when Nathan himself became a reality growing inside her belly. But they had loved each other. They endured together until love faded from their hearts, but they both fought for it, they struggled together.

Loraine was fighting alone; he would never fight by her side. He was simply not interested.

She once told me there's no such thing as inherited evil, can you believe this woman, kid? So thoughtful, so loving, always taking care of others… how can she love us? Do you ever stop and wonder, boy, 'cause I sure do every night… when I go to bed with her I just look at her while she sleeps right next to me and I know I don't deserve her. And still, she loves me.

Women, huh?

Nathan got on his feet again and leaned his body on the bookshelf. Then he looked down at his own hands: his wedding ring was burning against his skin.

"I don't love her."

"I know," the doctor replied softly, breaking eye contact. "Why don't you get a divorce?"

Silence.

You and I both know; we are the sons of crime. We are dark men, Nathan. Did you feel it back then, when you were but a little boy? Inside of you, growing and taking hold of you like a parasite choosing its final host. Something dark, something dense… Like a silent sin that grows deep within you that you know, at some point, is gonna scratch until it reaches the surface.

"Nathan…" the doctor exhaled loudly, "your father's death is affecting you, whether you see it or not. When we grieve, when we mourn, we break up with a part of ourselves that we want to keep. Your father was a strong, young man; the news about his decease took you by surprise and it all happened so fast you barely had any time to readjust to this new reality."

"I know…"

Voice weaker than before, Nathan began to feel the warmth of tears as they streamed down his face. He hadn't cried in years. He hadn't cried after her.

"Why did this happen to me? Why me?"

Because we are vermin.

But even if my blood is your blood, my flesh is your flesh and my sins are your sins don't you think, not even for a moment, that we are family.

You and me, we are vermin, we are mud from the same broken valley.

"Why not you?"

Silence.

"Nearly twelve years ago, when your father Julian resigned and made you CEO, you knew he would always help you."

It was crystal clear for the younger man that his therapist wasn't simply talking about professional guidance. Julian was a capable man; a shark in the industry, but back then, he was just a father reaching out and trying to console his son. When Julian resigned and made Nathan the brand-new CEO of Bhertineslitsz Pharmaceuticals, he was trying to give his son a new compass in his life, a new North for him to walk towards to. A new aim, a new perspective.

He had lost himself trying to find her. And Julian wanted him back even if it meant losing his other son to the contagious plagues of jealousy and envy.

"And he did," the doctor went on, "he helped you. He assisted you and taught you everything you now know about the pharmaceutical industry. But now he's gone. Now you might be feeling alone again, Nathan." The man paused for a second, his eyes trying to find Nathan's. "As alone as you felt back then when she disappeared."

It took him a moment for his eyes to finally stop raining. He paced around the room in silence until he sat back down on the divan; his hands landing heavily on his knees. He sighed.

"I used to dream about her, I told you this already. But the dreams stopped a few months ago."

His eyes were vacant, staring out the window.

"I'm walking down the street. I can't place the city; I think it's probably LA but I'm not really sure. Then I see her. She's standing a few steps away from me, waiting for the traffic lights to change. I walk towards her and touch her shoulder ever so lightly, so she turns around and sees me. She doesn't say anything to me, she just grins at me. It's not a mocking grin but more of a peaceful smile and I smile back at her and suddenly I realize that the traffic lights have already changed but she doesn't go; she stays there with me. She looks into my eyes and smiles again, and I begin to ask her things such as 'How have you been?' or 'How are you?' or even 'Where have you been all this time?' but she never answers. She just keeps on smiling at me, and I feel numb and confused so I smile as well. We stay that way for some time and then, at some point, she looks at me differently, just as if she is about to open her mouth and finally say something to me. But every time she's about to speak I wake up."

His fingertips were now massaging his temples. The headache was back.

"During all this time, I've always longed to find meaning in that. Because I'm sure there must be some kind of twisted meaning encysted deep within that dream. It's like a punishment, you know. It shouldn't feel that way, but it does somehow. Her voice is more than her voice, it's a symbol. It's a barrier I cannot trespass."

He rubbed his knees, mimicking the motions of an old man. Yet he was still intrinsically young.

"I went to the cemetery to find that dream," he confessed. "I want my dream back."

The therapist tilted his head to the side then turned over his shoulder and closed the window again; the cold breeze of the quiet night was growing colder by the second.

"And did you find it?"

"No. But I found something else instead," he spoke somberly. "I saw her – and myself, in the cemetery. They were staring back at me; I know how this sounds, I know you might think I'm going crazy, but I swear I'm not. I saw them, and they saw me." As his eyes widened and narrowed time and time again trying to guess his therapist's reaction, the man leaned forward, expectantly, but the professional simply folded his arms over his chest, grabbed his forgotten pen and began writing in his little black notebook.

"What? Nathan inquired, nearly demolished by the lack of reaction from the professional. "Nothin' to say?"

Only then the middle-aged man looked him in the eye,

"What do you want me to say?" His voice, albeit soft, was becoming increasingly impersonal. "Do you want me to tell you that you're not crazy? Or perhaps you need me to tell you that whatever you think you saw, it wasn't real?"

His hands balled up to create tight, enraged fists.

"It was real. My son saw them too."

As the therapist closed his notebook again and rolled his eyes at Nathan, he could sense the verity in those words. Still, it didn't mean that Nathan had seen himself with his missing girlfriend in the cemetery. It would make for a good horror movie, the doctor pondered, but this was real life.

"Ghosts do not exist."

Nathan's knuckles turned white in fury: he knew no-one would believe him.

"My son saw them too."

"As you did, your son, a five-year-old kid, saw two people. But unlike you, he never met Alexandra so he can't really say that the woman he saw was indeed her. I'm not saying that you didn't see anything; I believe you when you say you saw someone, a man and a woman. Perhaps you saw the ones you would have liked to be, perhaps you saw the you that you would have been with her." He wasn't fond of coldhearted terminology but in cases like this, he knew he had no choice. "It's called transference, Nathan. You and your son must have seen two strangers and your need, your emotional baggage gave them faces; the faces you needed to see."

It made sense, in a way. It was plausible. Logical.

"Why did you bring your son?" The question brought him back to reality.

"I told you, I didn't want to go alone."

"You could have brought your wife instead, it would have been a much more sensible option," the doctor kept on pushing, "and you know it, Nathan. Why the boy? Why your son?"

Silence.

There were a million reasons why for him not to choose Loraine. She was no fool, she knew he had only married her because she was pregnant. Still, a part of him had always tried his best to protect her, as if trying to compensate for something, an old debt from his past.

"I don't want her to feel like she's replacing someone," Nathan finally said. "I don't want her to feel like she has the responsibility or the obligation, to be someone else. I know it's not much but it's something I have always felt, ever since we met – the need to differentiate her from Alex, you know?"

"What do you mean?" The therapist inquired.

"It's not her family… she doesn't have to interact with them. I don't want her to feel like she's stealing somebody else's place," he breathed out, feeling exhausted. "I always knew I could never take her to visit Alexandra´s parents. It's not because there's something wrong about Loraine, far from it, but she's just not their daughter. She's the one that stands in the exact place where their daughter used to be." For the first time in what felt like an eternity, he was finally able to speak freely about his wife. "And it's not her fault. She didn't ask for a broken man, she didn't ask for a story so twisted."

"Do you feel like you owe her? And I'm not talking about your children…"

The younger man considered his possible answers but, in the end, he simply chose silence over words. He shook his head once, then twice, more energetically than before.

"If I had to be honest," he said, "it's not like she saved me, it's quite the opposite."

"Why?"

"Why?!" The CEO exclaimed. "Because I wasn't ready to let someone in again but she was pregnant, what was I supposed to do?" Hands in the air, furious, he went on. "I was devastated, and she comes to me and says we're having a baby, Nate, I couldn't fuckin' breathe!"

The doctor nodded quietly. Guilt, he thought, was the only word that could describe what Nathan felt towards his own wife. Resentment, perhaps, especially taking into consideration the fact that Loraine was, in spite of Nathan's efforts, occupying somebody else's space.

The spark of a doubt ignited inside the therapist's mind. It was a question he had been keeping inside for quite some time but every time he had found himself on the verge of releasing those words, his patience had always prevailed. This time, though, it was different. This time, Nathan had seen or perhaps envisioned himself and the woman he still loved.

"What if Alex came back?"

Stunned, the younger man looked at the palms of his own hands.

"What if she returned, Nathan?" The doctor insisted, even when the answer was painfully obvious and written all over Nathan's pale face. "What about Loraine?"

A bittersweet grin tainted his sight. The question was pointless: that man was always going to choose Alexandra over Loraine. With a heavy heart, the older man sighed, nearly soundlessly, tempted to reach inside the top drawer for a pack of smokes.

"Why did you choose to become the man in the middle?"

Nathan brought one of his hands to his chest, letting it linger before his heart even if only minutely. His other hand was still resting on his knee, as if trying to quiet down the leg underneath as it moved up and down in a stoic yet maddening rhythm.

"The man in the middle?" He asked, mildly surprised and the older man nodded calmly.

"The one that stands right in the middle of the adventure of the future (your son); and the irrecoverable past, Alexandra."

As the professional stood up and walked around the desk, Nathan could feel his limbs going numb. He hadn't seen it that way, he had never really thought about it.

"The future is secure. Your son is sheltered by you and your wife, but the past is also secure," the doctor paused for a second as he leaned his body on the desk and folded his arms over his chest. "The dead cannot be harmed; they can't be hurt. In their own way, they are safe. You were the only one in that scene that was completely alone, even if you were standing right beside your little boy. You were the only one who's still not secure, not safe… unsheltered."

As the younger man rubbed his fingers against his temples, the image of that couple staring back at him in the rain invaded his mind.

It was all he could see. Real or not, the feeling was unmistakable. He hated them. Deep down, he couldn't help but feel angered by those people, as if depowered by them. The expressionless looks they had shared, their silent benevolence, as if they pitied him.

"The only way out is through, Nate," the old man offered as he sat back down behind his desk, yet his simple words only seemed to spark the flames of fury burning inside of Nathan.

"I hate them," the younger man spat coldly. "I know I'm supposed to cruise amongst these ghosts, but I can't. I just can't."

"What do you feel?" The therapist leaned forward, his chest almost touching the desk.

Nathan embraced his own private agony with eyes closed, and lips parted.

"I know this is the price I have to pay after all the bad shit I've done," he began, even if he had never told his therapist a single word about his deals with Kano. He never really had to: stress, work, the responsibilities of a man in his position… All the bad shit he had done could mean every time I came home late, every time my kids needed me, and I wasn't there…

"This is it; this is the punishment. My mind plays these tricks on me and makes me believe that she's still out there, somewhere, with me… even if I'm not that man I feel like I am, somehow. It's like we are still together in some other place that I can't reach."

"Did you recognize yourself in that other man?"

"Yes."

As the therapist checked the clock and finally reached inside the top drawer, fingers already grasping his pack of cigarettes, the last question of the night hovered in the space between them.

"When you looked at this man… when you saw yourself in that man, what did you see? What made you feel that this other man was, in fact, you?"

Your eyes gave you away.

"We are the same piece of shit."

Author's note: Italics selection from the opening quote is not mine. It's the author's original selection.