Who: Valerie Everest and Dr. Spencer Reid Where: Valerie's room When: Monday afternoon What: A therapy session, of sorts.
For one, she had showered; her dark hair was clean and pushed behind her ears, not used as a defense mechanism and not hanging in greasy strands from her scalp. She looked better than she had in a long time, dressed in faded Salvation Army jeans and a gray men's undershirt, Indian-style on her bed. Her notebooks were everywhere as always, forming a sort of parchment carpet over the floor, but there wasn't a pen in her hand (or even within arm's reach) when Dr. Reid showed up to check in on her.
The loss of Wolf Jager had done wonders for her. Likewise, the introduction to The Caterpillar had finished it off; Trystan was an interesting man, a factor in her neverending novel that simply seemed to make sense. She had given him the profane and sacrilegious letters she'd written to Wolf to dispose of, and hadn't written any since. Instead she had filled her pages with more fictional scrawls. Dr. Reid featured heavily into them, his optimism that she could maybe be rehabilitated some. She wondered if he had ever read her father's books. She herself had read them hundreds of times, gone through dozens of copies of each title. Even the ones on her shelf now, relatively new, were dogeared and half-tattered.
"Dr. Reid," she said in greeting, her voice as soft and sweet as ever, but there was a genuine smile on her lips, the gleam of her teeth, and she visibly perked up upon his entrance. "How're you?"