I put my hand out to the tiles at my side, staring down at the plughole, the shower curtain tangled in my limbs.
I groaned and pressed a hand to my breastbone, breathless, poleaxed.
Your memories will come back to you when you least expect it. You’ll see something, or hear something, some kind of trigger . . .
But the trigger had been down in the basement all this time and Sam hadn’t wanted me to see it. He’d kept it from me on purpose, carefully maintaining the gaps in my memories.
The gaps he’d created.
My head swam.
The porcelain blurred.
Ask Sam and our first meeting was like something out of a rom-com movie. It was a story he’d told me many times . . .
I thought of something else then, something Donovan had said.
Upstairs, when I’d thought he’d been taunting Sam – which in a way he had been – without realizing he was telling me something, too.
You wrote this one piece. It was about how some phobias have a simple trigger and others are much more complex. I’m paraphrasing, but I think your general point was that there could be a real mixture of reasons. A childhood incident overlaid with another trauma, for example. Or layers of multiple traumas. They can confuse the picture. Get jumbled up.
Just as my thinking had been jumbled up.
Just as Sam had jumbled it for me.
Because my fears about this basement hadn’t been a simple case of claustrophobia.
They’d been far more complex and sinister than that.