Disclaimer: I don't own the characters of JAG. I do own Kat and Stan.
Spoilers: Everything from all 8 seasons.
Author Note 1: This is going to start out with more angst than I normally write, but for some reason, this fic demanded to be written. So if you don't like angst, it's not for you. My faithful beta reader has assured me that it's neither "too angsty" nor forced angst, if that helps. And if you have any doubts about the ultimate outcome, just remember how my other fics have turned out. ;) So if you will, please bear with me. Harm just had some things that he needed to say.
Author's note 2: I used a psychological term which doesn't really translate well into anything else, but isn't one that people outside the profession commonly know. It is "affect" as a noun: Feeling or emotion, especially as manifested by facial expression or body language: “The soldiers seen on television had been carefully chosen for blandness of affect” (Norman Mailer). (www.dictionary.com). The pronunciation puts the accent on the first syllable.
Feedback is always appreciated at aerm1@aol.com.
Part 1
18:00
Office of Stan Webber, L.C.S.W.
Washington, DC
"Harmon Rabb?" A tall, angular man stood in the doorway separating the waiting room from the rest of the office suite. He was ignoring the clipboard in his hand as his eyes scanned the people sitting in the slightly uncomfortable chairs in the outer office. Stan Webber had learned early in his practice that if the chairs were too comfortable, some patients balked at leaving the relative safety of the waiting room to go into the more dangerous inner offices.
At the sound of his name, a tall, athletic-looking man unfolded himself from a chair and carefully returned the magazine he'd been reading to the shelf.
Stan watched the man's action with interest, knowing that he often learned more from his patients' actions than from their words. As Harmon Rabb approached him, Stan held out his right hand in greeting. "Hello. I'm Stan Webber. It's nice to meet you."
Harm nodded politely as he returned the greeting. "Nice to meet you too."
"Please follow me," he said, holding the door open for his six o'clock appointment. Once Harm was in the corridor, Stan led him to the end of the hallway and ushered him into his private office.
Harm looked around the room, taking note of the comfortable-looking leather chairs and sofa and the deep mahogany desk that resided beneath a large window. Late afternoon sunlight streamed in through a bank of windows on the western side of the room. The office looked like a well-appointed den or study.
"Have a seat," Stan said, gesturing toward the sofa. He took up residency in a large wing-back chair that was across from it. "The first thing I want to say is that anything you tell me in this room comes under the laws of patient privacy and therapist-patient confidentiality. So whatever you tell me stays here in this room." As Harm lowered himself to the couch, Stan asked, "So Mr. Rabb, why don't you tell me a bit about yourself?"
"You mean like why I'm here?"
"Not right away. First, I'd like to get to know you a little. Find out a bit of who you are." Stan leaned back casually in his chair. "You know, things like what do your friends call you, where did you go to college, what's your occupation, how many brothers and sisters do you have. That sort of thing. By the way, please call me Stan."
Harm took a deep breath. "All right, Stan. There's not a lot to tell. My friends call me Harm or Rabb." When he heard his own voice, a shadow moved across his face. Harm blinked and the lines that had appeared in his expression smoothed themselves out.
Stan made a note of the odd reaction Rabb had had to hearing himself say what his friends called him.
"You can call me Harm, I guess." Harm licked his lips. "As for college, I went to the Naval Academy and to law school at Georgetown. I'm a commander in the Navy JAG Corps. My family is kind of different."
"In what sense, Harm?"
"My mother lives in California with my stepfather. I have a half-brother in Russia. No sisters. Oh, and my grandmother lives in Pennsylvania."
"Are you all close?"
Harm blinked. "My family?" He chewed on his bottom lip. "Closer than we used to be, I guess. It's hard though, when I live a continent away from my mom and an ocean away from my brother." Another shadow crossed his face as he heard his own words.
"Are you married? Any children?"
Harm gave a short laugh. "Not hardly. You know what they say, don't you?"
"No, what do they say?"
"That if the Navy had wanted you to have a wife, they'd have issued you one."
Stan chuckled. "That's good." He looked over his notes briefly. "Do you mind telling me what happened to your father?"
"No, of course not. He was shot down over North Vietnam when I was six."
"That must have been hard."
"Yeah, it was Christmas Eve."
"That's doubly hard then."
Harm nodded. "He ejected from his plane and was captured by the North Vietnamese. He never came home, though, when the other POWs were released at the end of the war."
"So he died in a prison camp?"
"No, he had been taken to the Soviet Union for questioning about American aviation technology. They never released him. He escaped in 1980 in Siberia." Remembered pain flickered in Harm's eyes. "He was killed by Russian soldiers there in 1982."
"That must have been difficult to deal with. I am curious, though, Harm. How on earth did you learn that?" Stan looked curiously at his new patient.
"Actually, I can't tell you all of it. It's classified."
"You're kidding."
"No. I can tell you that a few years ago, I found out that my dad had been taken to Russia. The first chance I got to take leave, I went to Russia to try to find him. But all I found was that he was dead." He pinched the bridge of his nose and then ran a careless hand across his eyes, surreptitiously swiping at the moisture in them.
"That must have been a terrible disappointment." Concern and sympathy filled the therapist's voice.
"It was. I'd believed he was still alive for so long..." His voice trailed off. "It was an adventurous trip though. My partner and I got shot down and had to eject from a plane, and we almost got killed by a rogue former KGB agent. So it was an interesting summer vacation."
"I can imagine," Stan said dryly.
"Now that I think about it, I seem to have had a fair number of interesting summer vacations."
"Really? Do they have anything to do with why you're here?" Stan asked gently.
The naval officer nodded, his tongue slightly between his teeth. "Yeah. This last one about did me in."
"Oh?"
"I almost lost my best friend, a couple of other friends, oh, and did I mention the plane crash?"
"The plane crash?"
"It's a long story."
"And no doubt classified."
"Unfortunately, yes." Harm ran a hand through his hair. "I don't know. To be honest, I thought I was handling things pretty well, but then this friend of mine at work was talking about a client who had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and suddenly I felt like the walls were closing in on me."
"Why do you suppose that was?"
"Because he was talking about the symptoms and going over the questionnaire for diagnosing the disorder--I guess he wanted to use it as a defense for his client. He wanted my opinion. Anyway, as he went over the symptoms and the description of it, it suddenly hit me that maybe I have it too."
"And you want to find out?"
"Yes."
"Any particular reason why?"
Harm looked at him, perplexed. "I want to know if I've got it, so if I do, I can do something about it. You know, fix it."
Stan nodded. "All right. We can do an assessment. I'll be asking you a lot of questions. You'll need to answer as truthfully as possible."
"No problem." Harm relaxed back into the sofa cushions.
"All right. First of all, have you experienced any trauma recently?" Stan's pen was poised above his notebook.
"Like I said, there was the plane crash. My partner and I were on a mission, and I was flying an antique biplane..."
"You're a pilot? I thought you were a lawyer."
"I'm both. Anyway, I had just rescued her from being tortured, and we were trying to complete the mission. We ran out of fuel and crashed into a pine forest."
"Were you all badly injured?"
"Amazingly enough, no. Just some scrapes and bruises from the tree branches. I guess the trees slowed us enough that we survived relatively unharmed." His voice had gone down to almost a whisper as he related the incident. "The first words out of Mac's mouth were, 'Damn you, Harm. Every time I get in a plane with you at the controls, we crash.' Then she burst into tears."
"Understandable." Stan's voice was level.
"I suppose. But for some reason, it really hurt. I mean, I know what she said was true, but there wasn't anything I could have done to make it be different." His voice very low, he murmured, "And she didn't even thank me for rescuing her from the people who were going to torture her. Instead, she yelled at me for crashing the plane." He let his head drop into his hands, his elbows on his knees.
"How long ago was this?"
"A couple of months. That's what really bothered me about the client. I mean, it's been months, and I'm still having nightmares about it all. I feel so damn stupid."
"Why do you feel stupid?"
"I don't know. I just do. I guess maybe I should be able to control it better. And that bothers me. I hate feeling the way I've been feeling lately."
"And how is that?"
"Like I've lost control of my life. Frustrated. Numb. Scared sometimes." He sighed bitterly.
"Are you able to function?"
"What do you mean?"
"Are you able to get up every morning and go to work and do your job?"
Harm nodded. "Yeah. I can function. I just feel lousy. Like there is nothing to smile about."
"That's a good sign. What are you frustrated about?"
"I'm almost forty years old, and I'm where I was eight years ago. I feel like I haven't made any progress in my life at all." He shifted on the sofa. "I remember telling someone six years ago that I hoped to have a wife and family one day. At thirty-four, that seemed like a reasonable goal. But now..." He trailed off.
"When you said that, were you in a relationship that made marriage a possibility?"
"No. It was more a dream at that point."
"Any particular reason that you weren't in a relationship, other than the Navy hadn't issued you a girlfriend?"
"It's complicated. I had had a girlfriend a couple of years before. But the night before we were going to get together to discuss our future, Diane died."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Was it a car accident or had she been ill?" Stan asked.
Harm shook his head. "No. She was murdered."
"It must have been difficult for you when you were notified of her death."
"I wasn't notified." Harm rose and walked over to the windows to stare out into the early evening sky.
"Not notified? Then how..."
"Did I find out? I'm a JAG. She was in the Navy. We investigate crimes committed against and by our members. I was assigned to investigate the murder. I found out when I arrived on the crime scene that it was her."
Stan made some more notes. "I see."
"Do you? Or is that shrink talk to let me know you're listening?" Harm turned back toward the center of the room. "I apologize. That was uncalled for." He returned to the sofa and sat back down. "That's the kind of thing I'm worried about. I don't normally talk to people like that. It's out of character for me. But I've been doing it a lot lately."
"Believe it or not, Harm, I do see. It must have been a hell of a shock to see your girlfriend right after she was murdered."
"Well, they already had her in a body bag."
"Jeez." Stan scratched on his pad. "So did you solve her murder?"
"Finally, but not for about two years. And then I couldn't prove it."
"So the murderer got away with it?"
"No, he fell off a pier and got crushed to death when the ship squashed him between the hull and the pier." Harm took a deep breath. "I can't say that I'm sorry it happened."
"I imagine not, especially if you knew you couldn't bring him to justice." He looked at Harm appraisingly.
The naval officer gave a brief smile. "And no, I didn't push him off the dock. He saw my partner and thought he was seeing a ghost. He fell off the dock as he backed away from her."
"Why would he think he was seeing a ghost?"
"Because Mac could be Diane's twin."
Stan took a deep breath. "Okay, let me make sure I've got this straight. You used to date a woman named Diane who was murdered several years ago. Your current partner looks exactly like her. And you recently were involved in a mission in which she was almost tortured and could have been killed."
"Yeah. That sums it up pretty well."
"Any more traumas in your life?" Stan was trying to get his head around what this man had had to contend with.
"A few."
"Care to tell me about them?"
Harm shrugged. "How do you want them--in chronological order or by category?"
Stan raised an eyebrow. "You're serious." It wasn't a question.
"Yeah. Chronological or categorical?"
"Chronological order. Age at the time of trauma has some bearing on a diagnosis. You already said that your father was shot down when you were six. So that is event number one."
"I don't suppose your mother remarrying when she doesn't know for sure that your father is dead counts as a trauma?"
"It could. If you really believed that your father was still alive, it would have been traumatic to see her go on with her life. Might have made you wonder if she was likely to give up on you at some future point. How old were you when she did that?"
"Twelve, almost thirteen." Harm sighed. "Intellectually, I knew it was good for her, but it seemed like the worst sort of betrayal at the time."
Stan's pen flew across the page. "Okay. That one counts. Go on."
Part 2
"The summer I was sixteen, I ran away to look for my dad. I had heard of an ex-Marine colonel who believed that a lot of POWs were being held in Laos. So I emptied my savings account and bought a ticket to Bangkok to hook up with the guy."
"And something happened while you were there?"
Harm laughed harshly. "Oh yeah. I learned how to kill a man with my bare hands. I watched a sixteen year old girl I'd met there get killed by Laotian border guards."
"Were you hurt?"
"Other than a minor gunshot wound, no."
"Did you know the girl very well?"
Harm nodded. "As well as any sixteen year old couple knows each other. I guess I thought I was in love with her." He rubbed his face. "I tried to run to her, but the colonel pulled me back. When we went back, her body was gone." He shuddered at the memory. "It was my fault she was there. I'm responsible for her death."
"Really. Did you pull the trigger?"
Harm shook his head.
"Did you ask her to go with you into the jungle?"
"No. I tried to talk her out of it because it was so dangerous."
"So how is it your fault?"
"Because she was only there because of me. She told her mother and the colonel that if I was old enough to go looking for MIAs then she was too." He wiped the tears from his eyes.
"Do you think about it much any more? It has been a long time."
"Only every time I see a young Asian woman."
"What happens then?"
"I'm back in that jungle, hearing the helicopters and the machine gun fire, screaming at her to duck, watching her body recoil when the bullets hit."
Stan made another note. "So you're still having flashbacks twenty-some years later. Harm, did you get any counseling back then?"
"Hell no. How would I have done that? I was sixteen years old."
"Your mother didn't consider taking you to see someone?"
"She didn't know about it. She doesn't know about it."
"That you went to Laos?"
"No, she figured that out when I stupidly ran into a television news crew and wound up on the six o'clock news. The next thing I knew, the CIA had tracked me down; and I was on a plane back to La Jolla. I was in enough trouble for running away. I didn't think it would be smart to tell her all the details."
"I imagine not, but it might have been a good idea."
"Perhaps, but what sixteen year old has that much sense?" Harm's mouth twisted.
"Okay. Any more traumatic events in your life?"
"I guess the next one was my ramp strike."
"Ramp strike?" Stan was confused.
"A ramp strike is an airplane crash on the deck of a carrier. I crashed an F-14 onto the deck and killed my RIO--the guy in the backseat." Harm swallowed hard.
"And you feel guilty."
"Hell yes, I feel guilty. The guy was my friend, and I killed him."
"I thought that when there were crashes, the Navy investigated the cause. Were you held responsible?"
"No, they decided that it was just a horrible accident. I had night blindness caused by an eye infection that hadn't been properly diagnosed. It was the first time I'd been in the air since the infection. My eyes had seemed to check out all right. It was night and raining. I could barely see the carrier and was coming in too low. My RIO panicked and ejected us. He wound up landing in the fireball that had been our plane. I was only slightly luckier; I landed on the deck."
"Were you badly injured?"
"Yes. It was months before I could return to active duty. And then I was grounded."
"Yet you chose to stay in the Navy."
"Didn't have much choice. You go to flight school; they have you for ten years. They'd only gotten six out of me at that point."
"So that's when you went to law school?"
Harm nodded. "Yeah. It seemed like a decent way to try to do some good."
"I'm sure it is." Stan scribbled some more. "Did you receive any counseling after your crash?"
"Yeah. While I was still in the hospital and for a while afterwards."
"That's good. And does that bring us to the trip to Russia?"
Harm raised an expressive eyebrow. "No, there was the time I was kidnapped and tortured in China."
"When was that?"
"About seven years ago. I was in Hong Kong on leave prior to taking part in some diplomatic negotiations as legal counsel. I went sailing in the South China Sea. My boat was rammed by a Chinese warship, and I was taken to mainland China and put in a prison where they drugged me trying to find out what was going to happen in the negotiations."
"You said something about torture."
"Yeah. They knocked me around a bit. But what were really bad were the drugs and mind games the interrogator played. She made me think that my father was in the next cell and was talking to me."
"Good lord." Stan was beginning to wonder if his new patient had a vivid imagination or a history of hallucinations."
"Honestly, Stan. This really happened. I can get you a copy of the debriefing if you think I'm hallucinating now." Harm gave a slight smile.
"So did you escape?"
"More like I was rescued through the efforts of the partner I had at the time. She negotiated with some sort of black marketers and the commandant of the prison camp got me back to Hong Kong in exchange for asylum in the US."
"Did you get any counseling after that?"
"Yeah. If the Navy feels you need it, they provide it."
"Uh huh. So what was next?"
"Is it traumatic to be assigned a new partner who could be the twin of your dead girlfriend two months after her death?"
"Could be. Did you have any reaction to that at the time?"
"For a while, it was a constant feeling of deja vu. I'd hear her voice and think it was Diane. I'd see her face and the Marine green uniform would morph into Navy blue. It was pretty freaky for a month or two."
"But you got over it?"
"Yeah. Their personalities are so different that I eventually quit seeing Diane when I looked at Mac." Harm shifted his position on the couch. "But I'm not sure that Mac has ever believed me."
"Does that bother you?"
Harm thought about it for a few minutes. "Yes, I guess it does. Even though in some ways Mac understands me better than anyone else I know, there are some things that she just doesn't seem to understand at all."
"How do you feel about that?"
"Aren't we trying to decide if I have PTSD?" Harm quickly changed the subject.
"Right. We are." Stan looked at his notes. Harm had certainly suffered more than his share of traumatic events, starting at a very early age. "All right, let me ask you some more questions. If there is more you want to say about traumatic experiences, we can come back to them."
"All right."
"Do you have nightmares and/or troubling memories of any of these events?"
"Some of them."
"Like Laos?"
"Yeah. And I used to have them of the ramp strike, but lately that's been better."
"Do you stay away from places that remind you of the event?"
"Not really, no. Well, I did at first, after the accident. But not any more."
"Do you jump and feel very upset when something happens without warning?"
"Sometimes. It depends on what else is going on."
"Do you have a hard time trusting or feeling close to other people?"
"I don't have any trouble trusting people."
Stan looked at him closely. "What about feeling close to other people?"
"I've got plenty of friends." He gave Stan a hard look.
"That's not what I asked." Stan glared right back at him. "You said earlier that you had wanted to get married and have a family. But you are almost forty and it hasn't happened. That sounds to me like you have trouble feeling close to people."
Harm stared at his hands that were clasped loosely between his knees. "Just women. Don't get me wrong. I love women. I've had several relationships in the past six years."
"But?"
"But they have usually been with women that I knew from the beginning weren't going to be the one." He looked back at Stan. "And yes, they have all complained that I didn't ever open up to them or whatever it is they wanted me to do."
"Why do you suppose that is?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I dated the wrong women. Maybe I'm incapable of true love."
"If you were incapable of love, do you really think you would have spent twenty years trying to find your father? Or two years trying to find your girlfriend's murderer?"
"Perhaps not. But I certainly have been screwing it up lately."
"That bother you?" Stan kept his voice carefully neutral.
"Hell yes, it bothers me. I want a wife and a family, but every day that passes makes it that much more unlikely. Especially since I'm pretty sure I missed my chance."
"Interesting. How did you do that?"
"The woman I love made it clear that she wanted a relationship with me about four years ago, but I told her not yet."
"She didn't want to wait?"
"Apparently not. She took another man's ring the next night," Harm said wryly.
"So she's happily married to someone else?" Stan was beginning to think it was miraculous that Harmon Rabb wasn't spending his days in a padded room.
"No, I accidentally ruined her wedding. And by the time the dust settled, her fiancé had called the whole thing off."
Stan shook his head in amazement. "Do I want to know how you ruined her wedding?"
"I dumped an F-14 in the Atlantic Ocean during the rehearsal dinner. She postponed the wedding until I was safe."
"Were you injured?"
"Some. I spent two weeks in the hospital." Harm shrugged again. "It was a couple of years ago."
"This woman that you love, have you made any attempts to get closer to her since then?"
"Once or twice, but every time I have, she's walked away from me. So I assume that she doesn't want a relationship any more." Harm leaned his head back on the back of the couch and sighed wearily. "I can't blame her. I wouldn't want me either."
"We'll come back to that," Stan said as he made some more notes. "I have a few more questions. Do you get angry easily?"
Harm's mouth twisted. "Not normally, no."
"Do you feel guilty because others died and you lived?"
Harm rolled his eyes. "If you were me, wouldn't you? Most of the people I've cared about that died, died because I screwed up. Either I wasn't fast enough, or strong enough, or I wasn't there to save them, or in the case of my RIO, I wasn't smart enough to realize I couldn't see until it was too late."
"Do you have trouble sleeping?"
"Sometimes. Mostly if someone I care about is in danger."
"Because you think you should be with them to keep them safe?" the counselor probed.
"Something like that." Harm stared across the room at the darkening sky.
Stan jotted a few comments in his notebook before looking back up at Harm.
"So what's the verdict?" Harm asked.
Stan pursed his lips. "We can make a case that you have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You certainly have more than enough indicators and symptoms. My guess is that over the years you have developed some coping skills that worked up to a point, but your most recent adventure was too much."
"So I am crazy."
"No, Harm. You're not crazy. If you were, you wouldn't be able to function. You'd be in a padded room somewhere. But it does sound like you sometimes have trouble dealing with more traumatic events than any one person should ever have to deal with. Am I correct in thinking that you have a lot less difficulty with the work-related traumas?"
"I guess so."
"Why do you suppose that is?"
Harm gestured with his hands, palms turned up. "I don't know. Maybe because they were less personal."
"I wouldn't call being tricked into thinking your father was alive and talking to you as 'less personal.' Crashing a jet into the ocean and almost dying is pretty personal too." Stan gave him a pointed look.
Harm blew out a deep breath. "The work-related events were the ones I had counseling about?"
"Right. One of the most important things we know about the treatment of PTSD is that the sooner and more fully one can talk about the trauma, the less likely a person is to actually develop PTSD. Consequently, the main treatment is getting the individual to confront the trauma and talk about it. And not just the facts. Talk about feelings that are involved with the trauma."
Harm squirmed on the sofa. "I'm not very good at that."
"At confronting the truth?"
"No, at talking about my feelings." He shrugged. "I never have been."
"I'm not surprised. You lost your father at a very early age. People probably told you to be a man about it."
Harm nodded. "Oh yeah. Except for the first day or so after he was shot down, I don't think I actually cried about my dad until I was in my thirties."
"I'm not surprised. We live in a culture where men aren't supposed to cry. But stress has to relieve itself eventually." Stan tapped his pen on the pad. "Do you talk to any of your male friends about your feelings? Or are your friendships with men the typical 'watch sports, play ball, fix the car' type?"
"The latter, I guess," Harm answered reluctantly.
"So you aren't really close to men either."
"When you put it that way, I guess not. Although I do have one friend who sometimes pushes for me to open up." He grinned slightly, thinking of Sturgis.
"And do you?"
"Not if I can help it." His mouth twisted.
"Why do you suppose that is?"
Harm bit his bottom lip. "I don't know. Maybe I'm afraid that if I ever start talking, I won't be able to stop. Or maybe I figure that nobody really wants to hear what I have to say."
"What makes you think that?"
"Past experience."
Stan crooked an eyebrow. "Care to explain?"
"Several years ago, I found out that my vision problem was correctable with laser surgery. When I tried to talk to Mac about whether or not I should have it, she blew me off."
"Did you have the surgery?"
"Yeah. And it worked. So then I had to decide if I wanted to try to return to active flight duty."
"Any particular reason you considered that? I'm assuming you had put in as much time at JAG as you had in aviation at that point."
"That's what Mac said. But I had spent my entire life wanting to be a pilot. And I didn't choose to give it up. It was taken away from me. It was my dream. And honestly, I've never been happier or felt more alive than in the cockpit."
"So did Mac support your decision?"
"Not really. She would barely discuss it with me. My girlfriend dumped me over it. My friends at JAG all acted like I had betrayed them."
"But you went anyway."
"Yeah. I had to. And when I came back, I was the odd man out for quite a while." He shrugged. "So I guess that's why I figure there isn't much point in opening up to people."
"Do people open up to you?"
Harm gave a harsh laugh. "Oh yeah. I'm everybody's favorite big brother."
"So your friendships are somewhat one-sided."
"I didn't say that."
"If you had a problem, who would you call?"
"Mac or Sturgis."
"And they would help you?"
He nodded. "Yeah. They would."
"That's good." Stan glanced at his watch. "Harm, our time is up for today."
"Are you going to tell me how to fix myself?"
"Of course. In fact, I'm going to give you an assignment to complete before our next session. If you put some effort into it, it will go a long way toward 'fixing' you." Stan smiled at his client. "Remember, the most important thing to do with PTSD is to confront the demons and talk about them. You're in the military; you should know that you need to know your enemy in order to defeat him."
"True. So what's the assignment?"
"I get the feeling that you are really uncomfortable talking about your feelings. Nevertheless, you really need to express them. So your assignment is to write about them. Remember in school when you had to write compositions on 'What I Did on My Summer Vacation'?"
"Yes."
"I want you to write those essays. Write about the traumatic events that you told me about today. If there are more, write about them too. But don't stop with the factual description of the events. Write about how you felt at the time--and how you feel now. It may sound odd, but the more detailed you can be, the better it will be for you."
"All right."
"And it doesn't have to be perfect. Don't worry about going back and proofreading. The point is to let out the emotions. And then next week, when you come in, we can talk about what you've written."
"I can do that."
"Same time work for you?"
"It's fine." Harm rose from the sofa. "Stan, how long is it likely to take before I'm okay?"
"Hard to say. Part of it depends on how much you can make yourself face the pain openly. You seem to have built some pretty thick walls around yourself. Once you tear them down, you will be able to heal. How long that takes depends a lot on how long you want it to take. Best case -- a month or so. Worst case, a year or two. Or you don't confront much at all and we deal with the acute trauma right now, and you continue to have flashbacks and nightmares under certain circumstances. It's largely up to you."
Harm held out a hand. "I see. Thanks for your time."
"See you next week, Harm. And don't forget to do the assignment. I think you'll be surprised at the effect it has on you."
Harm nodded once more and left the office.
As he backed out of his parking space, he pondered the past hour. It had felt good to talk about some of what he'd been through. Perhaps it was because Stan was a stranger and in no position to judge him. Harm decided he'd start on his assignment as soon as he got home. He had to get a handle on his feelings. And as soon as he did that, he was going to figure out if there was any point at all in continuing to want a relationship with Mac or if it was time to move on.