Cold Feet by Amy FitzHenry Page A

remember how you
felt
when you heard this, Emma?” she asked.
    â€œYes, I remember that moment exactly. I remember feeling sad and then saying to myself, Don’t be sad about this, Emma. And then I wasn’t,” I reported proudly to Dr. Majdi. “I told myself to stop caring, and I did. I was fine.”
    Dr. Majdi sighed audibly, turned to a fresh page in her notebook, and probably mentally reorganized her closet to account for all the new pairs of shoes she was going to buy with my forthcoming insurance checks. Then she tried to explain that I wasn’t really “fine.” I just
told myself
that I was fine.
    According to Dr. Majdi, we had two issues to tackle. I quickly organized them in my mind, like the lawyer on a lunch break that I was. There was one, my history with abandonment (father, physically; mother, emotionally, I subcategorized); and two, the neutral standpoint I’d adopted for coping with this history (in other words, my nonemotive explanation of the dad I’d never met and the mom who didn’t really like me). The fact that I’d told myself not to care, so, accordingly, I didn’t. Conclusion: This was unhealthy.
    â€œYou have may have
told
yourself that you don’t care, Emma, and that you were
fine
. But this was simply a coping mechanism. The pain and hurt from those experiences, they
went
somewhere. A good one, I have to admit. You were a
strong little girl
. But that didn’t make the pain go away. You braced yourself from the
pain
. You held it at
bay
. This worked at the time. But this approach will not
serve you well
in the long run.”
    What she was saying made sense, and it was probably good advice, but it made me realize that therapy wasn’t what I needed, not at that moment, anyway. The ability to freeze my pain and tellmyself not to be sad about my mom and dad was one of the things I was most proud of. Why would I want to break that habit?
    I was honest about this when I quit therapy, explaining to Dr. Majdi that I liked the coping mechanisms I had developed.
    â€œWhy would I stop doing the thing that got me through life up until this point?”
    â€œBecause you don’t
need
them anymore. You are not the same little girl. You have good friends, a job, a relationship. You have
security
. You need to face the bad things when they happen to you and when you
recall
the painful memories of your past, not
push them away
. Emma, you must turn
into
the wave of pain and let it wash over you. Because if not, someday after you have dived under these waves
time
after
time
, one will come along that is
too big
to avoid. And when it hits, you’re going to be
flattened
.”

CHAPTER 10
    A fter Liv and I decided we’d done enough fruitless Hunter research for one day, we headed back, exhausted, to Carrick’s place. Liv wanted to take a long shower, so I decided to go out for a coffee. Fresh air and a minute of quiet time sounded nice.
    I walked to a nearby Italian coffee shop—the kind with a gorgeous awning and comfortable chairs that seem mandatory to San Francisco—and sat down at a wrought iron table by the window. Latte and scone in hand, I experienced an “I’m going to be okay” feeling, which I held on to desperately. The good news, I comforted myself, is that I’m on vacation and eating pastries at a lovely coffee shop, rather than in my office in Downtown L.A. with a Kind bar and a cup of lukewarm coffee, writing a motion for summary judgment, as I had spent so many weekends prior. I watched a mom atthe next table silently hand pieces of croissant to her daughter, who was quietly reading a picture book. I briefly wondered what Caro would say if she knew what I was up to. I hadn’t told her about the search for the simple reason that it wasn’t any of her business. It would be like telling a current-day secret to someone who was your best friend in elementary school but you haven’t seen