M. 3 weeks in, she felt warmth. It was during the cold and hot cylinder exercise, and she wasn't sure at first she had been fooled before by what she wanted to feel. But he switched the cylinders twice without telling her. And both times she identified the warm one correctly.
That's new. He said it might be nothing. It might be, but it wasn't there two weeks ago. He wrote something in his notebook. He had a notebook spiralbound, the kind sold at drugstores in which he documented every session.
He wrote in it after nearly every exchange in a short hand she couldn't read from across the room and she had noticed he always dated each entry before closing it. The voluntary contraction came a few days after that. A sustained tightening of the left quadricep that lasted nearly 4 seconds. He timed it. She felt the muscle under her own palm and said nothing for a long moment.
"Is that what I think it is? " she asked. "Yes," he said. She nodded once and told him they should move on to the next exercise. She found out about the complaint on a Thursday morning. Renee forwarded her the internal memo without comment.
A note from HR indicating that an anonymous report had been filed alleging that an unlicensed individual was conducting unauthorized therapeutic treatment on a company executive on company premises. Quentyn had been verbally cautioned. A copy of the complaint had also been sent to his university's professional conduct office. Helena read the memo twice. Then she called Renee.
"Who filed it? " "It was anonymous," Renee said. "Who filed it? " A pause. The routing metadata on the internal system puts it through a terminal registered to Bridget Kane's floor. Helena set the phone down and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Bridget Kaine had been on the board for 11 years, had never approved of Helena's father's decision to hand the company to his daughter, and had spent the better part of the last 8 months quietly canvasing other board members with the argument that a CEO who couldn't walk into a meeting under her own power was a liability the company couldn't afford.
That evening, Helena told Quentyn what had happened. "I can have our legal team respond," she said. "No," he said. It would be straightforward to no. His voice was steady, not angry.
If you put lawyers on this, it looks like you're using company resources to protect a personal arrangement. That's exactly what Bridget wants it to look like. He paused. I don't need protection. I need to keep doing the work.
Helena studied him. This could affect your academic standing. I know that. And you're not concerned. I'm concerned, he said.
I'm more concerned about what happens to you if we stop. She didn't answer that. She looked down at her hands on the arms of the wheelchair, and for the first time since the sessions began, something that wasn't frustration or clinical focus crossed her face. She looked just briefly like someone who wasn't entirely alone. It was a Saturday morning, the 12th week, when Quentyn brought in the standing frame.
It was borrowed from his clinical rotation. He had cleared it with Dr. Carol Meyers and signed it out properly as he had signed out everything he'd used since the first session. He set it up in the center of the office without explaining what it was for. Helena recognized it immediately. No, she said not all your weight, he said.
We're just going to ask your legs to remember what bearing load feels like. I've been in a standing frame before at the hospital. Nothing happened. Your quadricep can now sustain a 4-se secondond voluntary contraction. That wasn't true when you were at the hospital.
He positioned the frame and looked at her. This is different. She wheeled to the frame. She gripped the side rails and let him assist her to a standing position, taking most of her weight on her arms, the way she always had in transfer movements. Now, let your arms do less, he said.
Quentyn, I'm right here. You won't fall. I know I won't fall. That's not She stopped exhaled slowly through her nose. If this doesn't work, "Then we document it and adjust," he said.
"That's all. " She looked at him. He was standing close enough to catch her if something went wrong, but he hadn't touched her. His hands were at his sides. He was waiting, not pushing. The difference mattered to her, though she hadn't told him so.
She let her arms do less. The weight transferred to her legs. Her knees trembled. Her whole body tensed with the effort of maintaining the position. 1 second, 2, 3.
On the fifth second, she made a sound. She immediately tried to suppress something between a breath and a word that didn't become either. And she was crying. She hadn't cried in front of another person since the hospital. She'd been careful about that.
Quentyn didn't move toward her. Didn't hand her anything. Didn't say, "It's okay. " or I knew you could or any of the things that would have required her to manage his feelings about her moment. He simply stood there and his expression was not proud exactly, not celebratory. He looked the way her father had looked the first time she'd closed a major deal and called him afterward like a man watching something he believed in turn out to be real.
She lowered herself back into the wheelchair. She pressed the back of her hand against her face. We document it," she said, voice steady. "Yes," he said. "And we keep going. " "Yes," she nodded.
Same time Monday, the following Sunday, Quentyn took Nia to the park he visited every weekend, a stretch of green beside the river with a long flat path and a bench near the water. He had mentioned it to Helena once off-handedly, and it was Renee who had quietly relayed the information. Helena told herself she wasn't doing anything strange by showing up. Nia ran up to the wheelchair with the candid boldness of a child who had not yet learned to be awkward around things she didn't understand. "You're the patient who doesn't believe," Nia said.
"Excuse me," Helena said. "That's what dad calls you, the patient who doesn't believe. " Nia studied her with the same focused calm Helena had noticed in Quentyn. "He doesn't mean it in a bad way. He just means you're stubborn. " Helena glanced at Quentyn. He was looking somewhere else with extraordinary concentration.