A/N: Maaaaan, there are some absolutely funky dresses on the Oscars...

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'You've reached the office of Dr Carol Bellamy. I'm not here to take your call right now. If this is not an emergency, please leave a message. If it is an emergency, please call the main office at—'

With a loud sigh, Lisa snapped her phone shut and leaned her head against the window. The person sitting next to her in the train gave her a sideways glance before looking back down at his magazine. For a few seconds, Lisa let her breath condense on the cold window as she looked out at the imposing barrack-like buildings of West Point crowning the hill sprouting from the ice-filled Hudson River. Her mind wandered hopelessly as the train wound back and forth, following the river up towards Albany.

It was truly an act of helpless defiance. Jackson left for work at 6:30, she took the kids by subway to school by 7:00 and still managed to make it on the 7:15 from Penn Station to Albany. She planned to do her covert business in Troy and then catch the 2:00 from Albany-Rensselaer to Pennsylvania Station so she could be home in time to make dinner before Jackson came home at 6:30. She also had to make sure to remember to put his little black book back into his desk drawer before he noticed it missing.

Lisa jolted out of her thoughts as a hand landed on her upper arm. Terrified, she turned to face the person only to find that the guy next to her was pointing at her cell phone as it did a little dance across the tray table. They'd established early on in the ride that he didn't speak English and she didn't speak Norwegian, so most 'conversation' between the two on the short train ride had been in the form of hand gestures. As she watched the vibrating screen, she gave him the thumbs up before grabbing it.

'Mom?'

'Lisa, is everything all right? I called your Dad and he said he didn't get any call from you and—'

'Mom, this is more of a psychiatric thing than a chatting thing,' she admitted right off the bat. 'I can't convince Jackson to see a therapist.'

'Honey, you can't force someone into therapy,' she said. 'Unless he's hurting you. Is he hurting you? Or the children? Lisa, if he's—'

'Mom!' Lisa said, exasperated. 'He's not hurting anyone, I'm just very worried about him. He's been distant, very forgetful, confused, and we had the weirdest thing happen a couple of nights ago.'

Lisa could hear the scratching sound of her mother taking down notes. 'Tell me about it.'

'Well, we were sleeping, and Jackson started just saying my name over and over again. I woke up, and when I looked over at him, he sat up in bed and purposefully fell over onto his nightstand like he was trying to break open his skull,' she said in a frantic whisper, turning to look out the window and cupping a hand around the speaker of the phone. 'Luckily, he just opened the skin, but the weirdest thing was that he didn't feel any pain from doing it.'

Scribbling answered her on the other end, soon accompanied by a sigh and a shuffling of papers. 'Lisa, I'm going to name some symptoms and would like you to say whether or not you've seen Jackson display them. Do you understand?'

She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, watching in her peripheral vision as the Norwegian man got up and started moving to the dining car. 'Okay.'

Carol cleared her throat. 'Lack of emotion sharing.'

'Come on, mom, you know that,' she whined. 'Check.'

'Over-controlling, hyper-irritability, narcissistic rage?'

'All of those, yes.'

'Concrete and ordered thinking?'

'That's why Crédit Suisse hired him in the first place. He's not at all flighty.'

'So check on that one too... rarely reflects on the past?'

'He just doesn't like to talk about it,' she said, trying to think back on the conversations they'd had about things in his past. 'I don't know if he thinks about it or not, but he doesn't vocalise things about his past.'

'All right. Do you know anything about Jackson's early life, Leese?'

'A little,' she replied, one eye awkwardly. 'What do you need to know?'

'Were his parents kind to him?'

Lisa thought about what Jackson had told him about his parents when he was recovering after the attack by Millwood. He killed them, yes, but she wasn't completely certain about all of the details. 'He went to boarding school when he was younger and when he was at home, it was only his mom at home because his dad lived in the city. His dad lost his job and came home, and that's when Jackson said he started abusing him.'

'Do you know what they did to him?'

'Father was an alcoholic, mother just kind of went along with everything even up until...'

And it was at that moment that Lisa remembered they'd never bothered to tell her parents that Jackson had murdered his own at the same time that she was dressing up in her mother's lab coats and diagnosing her stuffed animals with various mental diseases.

'Lisa? Are you still there?'

'Y-Yeah, mom, I'm still here. Sorry, we're in the forest, so the signal fades every now and then.'

'Now what were you saying about his parents?'

A long sigh. 'Mom, you have to promise not to tell Daddy about this, okay?'

'Doctor-patient relationship, honey.'

She looked around for a moment before whispering into the phone. 'They abused him so badly, that one day Jackson just snapped and killed both of his parents in the kitchen with an axe. I found the reports a few years ago in the public archives, and they said that he acted as though nothing of consequence had happened.'

There was uncomfortable audible silence on the other end.

'Don't tell Daddy!' Lisa said simply to break the silence.

'Dear, have you heard of a condition known as alexithymia?'

'No... should I have?'

'Well, I had a few patients back when you were a little girl, but I don't think you ever learned the name,' Carol replied. 'It's not uncommon, but very few people actually know the name of the condition. When I first met Jackson, I felt that he was very alexithymic, but as the years have passed, I've seen the symptoms fade away. Now it seems as though they've flooded back. How long has it been like this?'

'Just a couple of weeks.'

Carol clicked her tongue in a way that made Lisa realise she was slowly becoming her mother. 'You mentioned that he's sometimes forgetful or confused. I'm going to list off events and I'd like you to tell me if Jackson has experienced them in the last two weeks.'

'Okay,' she said, laying her head back on the headrest.

'Finding himself listening to someone talking only to suddenly realise he had no idea what the person said.'

'Yes, but I do that too. There are a lot of boring people up here.'

Papers shuffling yet again. 'He has the experience of finding himself in a place and having no idea how he got there.'

Lisa felt a little knot in her chest. After returning from Zürich, Jackson claimed to have not remembered arriving home. 'Check.'

'He finds himself dressed in clothes that he didn't remember putting on.'

Her hand slid down to sit right above her navel. 'A couple of days this week, he's started his "getting dressed" cycle twice only to catch himself in the mirror and then leave the house as though nothing happened.'

'He finds that he is sometimes able to ignore pain.'

'Mom,' Lisa said. 'What are these the symptoms for?'

'A condition called dissociative identity disorder, what we used to call multiple personality disorder. It's been linked to alexithymia by many research projects led by professors,' Carol said, taking more notes as Lisa knit her brow. 'Lisa, I'm very worried about how quickly these symptoms are coming to him. Where is Jackson?'

'At work,' she replied quickly. 'I saw him off this morning.'

'And where are you? Obviously not at home.'

'I'm going up to Albany.'

'Heavens, what for?'

She looked at the cover of Jackson's address book that was sitting so neatly on the tray table. 'I need to ask a friend of Jackson's some questions.'

'You need to get back to New York as soon as possible to institutionalise your husband, honey. I can take care of referral, talk to some colleagues in the area,' she said authoritatively. 'Dissociative identity disorder is not something to take lightly, especially not when it's been brought on so suddenly. Do you know any new stresses that could have caused this mental relapse?'

'Something happened last time he went to Switzerland, but I can't coax many details out of him.'

'Don't force him too hard,' Carol said in her Dr Bellamy voice. 'With alexithymics, it's better to ignore things that have happened in the past and just focus on the future, teaching them how to better express themselves rather than staying bottled up.'

Lisa hated the Dr Bellamy voice—she always got the same tone when her stuffed animals attempted suicide and had to be checked into her dollhouse mental hospital, or when she came home late during high school. 'I'll be home tonight and will bring this up with him.'

'No, honey, you need to make sure that he actually gets checked in somewhere. This is a very dangerous condition!' Carol said in a near panic. 'You need to call his office, call the hospital, get him taken care of!'

'Mom, I have facts now and names of conditions. As long as I have concrete evidence, he usually just goes along with what I'm telling him. I'll take care of this, don't worry,' she said, suddenly longing for the end of the phone call. 'I'll finish my things in Albany and be back in the City before it even gets dark. He'll never notice I'm gone, and he won't do anything when he's at work.'

Lisa could tell her mother wanted to say more, but after a long break, there was a sigh. 'Just keep me updated.'

'I will. Love you, Mom. Thanks for your help.'

'Love you too, Lisa.'