I took your comments on board and extended this chapter so it's slightly longer this time. Not much more. Maybe four, five hundred words or so. Longest chapter yet! Hope you like it!

Chapter 6

You sit there picking at the invisible thread on the couch as you wait for the Doctor Pearce to finish preparing the hot beverage he so kindly offered.

He's your therapist. Doctor Pearce. He came recommended. By Addison. He's a kind man. Blue eyes, salt and pepper hair, glasses.

But he's not your Jane.

He doesn't provide that same sense of calm that encompasses you You take a deep breath reminding yourself that she's only on the other side of the door, sitting in the waiting room, legs twitching unconsciously, most likely playing a game of angry bird on her phone. She never could keep still. It brings a smile to your face and immediately gives you a sense of calm.

This is your eighth session.

You're here because of the panic attacks.

You started having them shortly after Jane's return. One day you woke up to find that she wasn't there and just like, the walls started closing in, tears streaming down your face as you were suddenly hit by the belief that it had all been a figment of your imagination. That none of it had been real.

You thought you had dreamed it.

Her.

Till the sight of her and the sound of her voice as she came in the bedroom carrying the breakfast tray of pancakes, bacon, maple syrup and coffee. She barely had time to put the tray down as she read the anxiety in your eyes before you scrabbled up to meet her. Touch her. Re-affirm yourself of her . And refuse to let go. After that, they came intermittently. But they got worse after the knife incident at the crime scene. It's why you're sat on his couch now.

The two of you have talked about everything and nothing.

Sometimes, it's normal day to day stuff, how work's going. Others...it's deeper, more intense. You told him about Jane, how you held her in your arms as she bled over the hospital floor, how guilty you felt in letting her go in the room with the FBI agent but how pride and a whole lot of angst had held you back. From stopping her. From telling her that it hadn't been the shot that had made you mad and unable to see sense and logic, but rather the fact that you felt she had taken something away from you that day - the ability to find out who your biological mother was, and how you had felt that she hadn't acted taking you into account, as a friend, as a lover, but instead gone head long into her job and gotten caught.

You talk about how you felt the thud of your heart for every step the doctor took towards you, how your world came crashing down even before he uttered those fatal words. Because you could tell. There was loss in his eyes, a sense of defeatism. You talk about the funeral and the brief image you had of her standing there in the distance as she waved you farewell, the way you saw her lying next to you, had conversations with the air, all the while imagining she was there, that nothing had changed, when in fact, everything had.

You talk about the months you spent without her; how you closed yourself off from everyone else, shut down. How the life you lived hadn't been a life at all, but a mere existence. Day in, day out. How you focused on simply being able to put one foot in front of the other. How even in death, you had never stopped loving her, suspended in that limbo called time.

You talk about the notes and the present, and how they gave you life, hope, and a bittersweet pang at the thought for all you believed you had lost.

And in response, he's given you a variety of scenarios, of what ifs. They're things you don't work with because of the lack of certainty. But they send shudders through you nonetheless. You don't know what's worse. The image that Doyle so cruelly treated you to on the floor of his hospital room or the image of Jane not firing her weapon, of acting like your friend, lover and fiancé, of not being the cop that she is, of Doyle doing so like the criminal he is and firing his gun hitting Jane resulting in injuries that could have been a lot more traumatic or fatal because of the one cataclysmic difference that there wouldn't have been a medic on hand or a whole host of doctors and nurses ready and waiting but instead having to wait...countless minutes before help came while you are forced to watch the blood drain out of your lover's body, laden with the knowledge that given the circumstances, location and lack of medical apparatus, there's nothing you can do except stem the flow and hope for the best while you plead with her to hang on, throwing up silent prayers to a God you don't quite believe in.

You think perhaps the latter is worse because you would be so focused on trying to save her, that you wouldn't have been able to say all the things you got to say that day on the hospital floor, or hold her in your arms whilst the staff worked around you or rid her of the guilt and pain she carried. But then you remember the way the walls had closed in the moment you lay eyes on her surgeon's face; the loss, the panic, the utter devastation...the howl of pain that had ripped through you as you stood alone within the four walls of the operating theater surrounded by the bloodshed and her lingering scent. And you recall the reason why you don't work with 'what ifs', with such uncertainty. It's because it serves no useful purpose. Because at the end of the day, neither situation bears thinking about despite the fact that the first has already happened.

You stutter and stumble and struggle. But eventually, you get through it all.

Except for one...

Patrick Doyle.

Which is why you're here today. Or rather, it is what the good doctor has chosen to attempt to cover, to sort out during this session.

The mere mention of his name sends a fire through your veins. But the suggestion that you should go see him...the fire mixes with ice. There's a sense of indignation, anger, fury...resistance. You want nothing to do with the man. You said all you needed to say the day you stormed into his hospital room and Frankie had to drag you out, keep you from wrapping your hands round his neck to see if he could feel an ounce of the torment and suffering you felt, to see if he could feel at all.

But deep down, there's a part of you that accepts that there is a need to put it to rest. Completely. Utterly.

And in doing so, it would be the closing of one door and the opening of another.

It would mean that you'd finally be able to move on.

As always, you're comments and words are appreciated. Always. :)