Chapter 252. Healing the Scars

The room was nothing like what Anton expected.

In detail, he’d envisioned leather armchairs and bookcases crafted from dark mahogany wood and the murmur of pipe tobacco—a setting for the analysis of the rich man’s mind.

    

     This was light and silence.

    

     The floors creaked with the pale wood of oak. Walls were the color of sea mist on the horizon. There was that single abstract painting that hinted at the dawn without proclaiming it.

    

     There was no furniture other than the sofa that seemed comfy enough and two armchairs that were grouped together haphazardly around the small table that held the tray of water glasses and the box of tissues.

    

     This was no clinic but the serene and light sitting room of the sanatorium by the sea.

    

     His mind was still processing the experience of seeing the interior of the psychiatrist’s office for the first time.

    

     In another moment, Ella leaned against the doorframe and smiled at him.

    

     “Let’s wait for the doctor together

Dr. Mehta was a small woman in her fifties, with very observant and kind eyes and a calm demeanor that somehow sucked in all the agitated energy they brought with them.   They did not offer her a place behind her desk. She took one of the armchairs instead. That in itself said a lot.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, her words warm and deliberate. “This first session is simply presence. There is no agenda except for acknowledging that you are here, that you are together, and that you choose to attend to what you've survived.”

She sat stiffly on the edge of the sofa cushion, her very demeanor shouting operative on mission. She had agreed to this—not that she hadn’t sought Dr. Mehta herself, vetting her credentials and confidentiality policies with the same diligence she had used to track down the Dubai server—but her body was rebelling. This was the kind of vulnerability that scared her more than any kind of physical fight.

Anton had his own ideas about how to handle the situation. To list his problems in a quarterly report manner: Point One: Trust issues traceable to paternal deception and company espionage. Point Two: Problems with feeling guilty over operational mishaps and civilian collateral damage. Point Three: Problems with emotional intimacy from— He chopped off his thoughts, his hands clenching on his knee. Control was the source of the wound, not a dressing.

“Who would like to begin with a description of what a ‘healing’ might look like in an ideal world?” Dr. Mehta asked her audience with a gentle gaze.

It was a moment of silence. Anton could feel Sabatine's rigidness like a force field.

“An absence of triggers,” Sabatine finally replied, his words sharp. “Waking up without the memory of gunfire being the first thought. Being able to walk into a crowded room without automatically identifying exits and threats.”

Dr. Mehta nodded in agreement. "Safety—the lack of a nervous system operating on high alert always. And for you, Anton?"

“To… not see betrayal as the default setting.” To trust without it being an effort at complete and utter madness. "To be able to love her,” he continued, glancing at Sabatine, “without the constant, hidden fear that it makes me weak, that it will be used as a weapon against us.”

Sabatine's breath caught, an almost infinitesimal pause. She watched her own hands, clenched in her lap.

“So, then, for Sabatine, the process of healing is one of silencing the past’s warning signals, while for Anton, it is one of neutralizing threats posed by the coming future. Both processes, however, involve finding peace within the present, which, for now, is not suffused with gunfire or betrayal, but with the decision to be.”

It was a reframe so simple it was almost disarming. Anton felt a certain performance pressure lessen on his shoulders.

“The physical ones, of course, we can handle,” said Dr. Mehta. “We can see them, clean them, stitch them up. But emotional ones? These ones like to hide, to speak in whispers in the dark of night. And what the job of this place is, it seems to me, is to bring these into this light, into this quiet room, and simply say, ‘I see you. You’re a piece of my past, but you’re not my boss.’ Would either of you like to start with one of these whispers?”

The silence fell again, but it was no longer the same. Laden with the responsibilities of confession.

It was Sabatine who spoke, her voice low and aimed at the floor. “Geneva villa. The shot. It wasn’t the pain I remember. It was the sound Anton made. A. A raw sound. I’d never heard anything like it come from him. At that moment, I wasn’t the soldier who’d been shot. I was the cause of his utter devastation. This whisper: ‘You are damaged. You bring pain to those you are meant to protect.’ It is the same whisper from the op in Al-Rashid, in which the civilians…”

Anton’s chest broke open. The guilt for the mission, yes—never this particular perverse turn of events—that she had condemned herself for being the cause of his pain.

without thinking, reached out to cover her clenched fist with his hand. She was cold to the touch. “That sound,” he said, his voice rough. “That was what my end sounded like. Because if you were dead, there was no point to anything. No purpose in being a part of this company, no use in our money, no meaning in our legacy. It is a void. I see in the sound of my scar, ‘You are a calamity. Anyone who gets close to you is marked for destruction.’ I believe I once felt it when I lost my father. I certainly believed it when you fell.”

Dr. Mehta observed them intently. "So you both have the same wound—the belief that your own existence is the cause of deadly peril to each other. A paradoxical tragedy in which love is equated to death."

The clinical specificity of this remark was a shock to them all. It exposed for them the absurd and painful essence of their collective fear.

“How do we…. not believe that?” Sabatine asked the question a plea. She turned her hand under Anton’s, their fingers intertwining as if to a lifeline.

“First, you witness the belief, just as you did. You do not struggle with the scar. You do not argue with the scar. You hear the voice of the scar.”

     Dr. Mehta leaned forward slightly.

     “Anton, what you hear is the whisper, ‘You are a calamity.’ Now, what would you like to say back to the voice?”

He thought, and the old, cold logic rose up again. I have evidence. He moved past that in order to reach for the new truth that was being made in this room and in their moments of their private life. “I would say… ‘You are a warning from an old war. This is a new peace. She is not a victim of my story; she is the co-author of a new one.’”

One tear slipped out between the tightly closed eyelids and slid along her cheek.

“And you, Sabatine?” Dr. Mehta’s voice was soft. “When the whisper says you bring damage, what is your answer?”

She shivered, taking a deep breath, her thumb grazing the back of Anton's hand. “I would say, ‘I carry scars, but I am not a carrier of scars. I took a bullet, but I also stopped the hand that fired it. My presence is not a curse; it is a choice. His and mine.’”

The room seemed to hold its breath. The abstract sunrise painting on the wall was softly radiant in the light of the afternoon.

“Beautiful,” whispered Dr. Mehta. “These are your affirmations, and this is your wisdom speaking back to you. This is just the start of healing—not getting rid of the scars, but giving them a new significance.”

The session went on, threading through the smaller wounds: Anton’s fear of exposure, Sabatine’s struggle with the weight of peacefulness. They spoke of the encrypted package not just as a danger but also as a challenge for these new tools of coping that they’d developed for themselves. How they needed these rituals—a community signal for when the past was getting too loud, the way of saying 'I’m haunted' without using any words at all.

When the fifty minutes were up, Anton felt oddly weightless, not from relief, but from the hard work that had commenced. The scars had not disappeared; they had simply been noticed and brought into the room where they could be seen and in seeing, they lost power.

In the stillness of Kensington street, the autumn evening was cool. Sabatine did not release his grip on his hand. They walked in silence for a block, the holiness of the therapist’s room still surrounding them.

“It feels like we’ve just defused a bomb,” Sabatine said finally, her voice barely above a whisper. “A bomb that was inside us.”

"More like we’ve finally looked at the blueprint," Anton corrected. "Defusing is the work ahead." He stopped and turned to her. The vulnerability zone had narrowed from a chasm to a shared area. "The sound of your whisper. Sabe, you have to know. You are not damaged. You are the reason I’m learning to feel anything at all."

Her eyes, though red-rimmed, were bright and searched for him. “And you are no calamity, Anton. You are the first safe harbor I’ve ever known. Even when you’re infuriating.”

A gentle laugh escaped him. He pulled her into his embrace, there in the street, holding her in his gentle but firm grasp. She flowed into the embrace, her head buried in the wool of his coat. They stood there, embracing, for what felt like a long time, two survivors on the streets of London, enough of their wounds visible at last to breathe, to be witnessed, and finally, to mend.

The scars would always be there. The whisper of the gunshot, the echo of a father’s betrayal, the memory of a failed mission. But they had a new language too. They had a quiet room they could come back to. They had each other’s hands to hold on to when the old stories came loud. Healing was not a destination; it was a direction. For the first time in their lives, they walked in that direction together.

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