“Look, I did what you asked. I wrote about the firsts and the lasts.” I sigh. “I think it’s time to try something else. Let’s just call it done with the writing part of the healing process, okay?”

He rubs his hand over his mouth, then says, “But how does it feel, when you’re writing?”

“Honestly? It sucks to try to remember. It hurts. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“Ah. It hurts. Good,” he says.

Wait, I think, good that it hurts? But then it hits me: Dave knows about the numbness. Somehow, he knows. And this writing thing isn’t his attempt to get me to express my feelings so much as it’s trying to get me to actually have feelings.

Dave’s sneaky that way.

“Maybe I want to forget,” I say, just to be contrary. “Maybe it’d be easier to forget, and get on with my life. Isn’t that healthier? Moving on?”

“Is that what you really want?” Dave asks.

“Would you please stop answering my question with a question?”

“What would you like me to say? Aren’t there some vital questions that you must answer for yourself?”

Dave doesn’t play fair.

I sit back and consult the clock again. Ugh. Thirty-eight minutes.

“I think you should continue with the journal. Humor me for a while longer,” he says. “What I think you might need, to make the writing seem more relevant, is a recipient.”

“A recipient?” That doesn’t sound good.

“Someone you are writing to.”

Oh, this just keeps getting better and better.

He sees the look on my face. “Alexis. I’m not suggesting that you give the journal to anyone. It’s for your eyes only, I understand. But perhaps if you use the journal to express something to someone specific, you’ll be able to get some of the weightier issues off your chest.”

I arch an eyebrow at him. “You’re saying I need an imaginary audience, so to speak. Do you have someone specific in mind?”

“Well, let’s see,” Dave says, as if he hasn’t already given this a lot of thought. “Maybe you could write to a future version of yourself. Many people write their journals to future selves, I think. It demonstrates a kind of hopefulness.”

“So my audience would be some wise Alexis who’s made it through all this crap and occasionally cracks open this journal to see how far she’s come and says to herself, Whew, I’m glad that’s not my life anymore.”

“Exactly.”

I wish I could be her, I think. Fast-forward through this part of my life.

I shake my head. “But maybe she’s just as messed up as I am. Maybe all of this has twisted me irrevocably, and I will forever be incapable of a healthy, normal future. Maybe it would only torture Future Me, having this record of where it all went south.”

“Is that what you think?” Dave asks. “That you’re twisted?”

He takes a few seconds to write something in the yellow legal pad he keeps his notes on. This makes me nervous.

Time for a change of subject. “Or I could write to aliens or robots or whoever’s left in ten thousand years. An extraterrestrial will lift this book in its gray fingers and think, Hmm, so this was the life of a female Homo sapiens. How interesting.”

“Yes,” Dave says, like he is taking me completely seriously. “You could write to aliens.”

Who am I kidding? Nobody’s going to care. Not future me. And certainly not an alien species.

This is pointless.

“You could write to God. That has been known to be therapeutic to many people,” he suggests.

“No. I don’t have anything to say to him. I mean, I don’t believe in God.”

Dave writes more in his notebook.

“You could try writing to someone else,” he says then. “Someone you want to talk to. You could speak to him or her by writing. Even if that person never reads it. Even if that person can’t hear.”

That’s when I understand where he’s been leading me all this time. That person. “You mean Ty.”

“If you’d like.”

“I don’t want to write to Ty,” I say without hesitation. I had my chance to talk to him, when it counted, when it would have meant something, and I missed it. “He’s gone.”

“The people we love are never truly gone.”

“Yeah, you know what, you should design bumper stickers or something. That’s profound. That’s catchy.”

He sits back. “You seem tense today, Alexis. Has something happened?”

My heart rate picks up. A part of me still wants to tell him everything, ask him what I should do about the letter and talk about the times I’ve seen and smelled Ty, the dreams I’m having about him, just get it all out there in the open, see what he’ll have to say, but my desire to confess is still considerably less than my fear that he will think I’m crazy, and if a mental-health professional thinks I’m crazy, I probably am.

“Lex?” Dave prompts. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” I say automatically. “Nothing’s happened.”

Thirty-one minutes.

He sighs and writes something else in his notebook. “Well, I think your assignment this week should be to figure out some kind of audience for your writing.”

“A recipient,” I say.

“Yes.”