Rejected Reborn

Getting to work

# Chapter 5 — Getting to Work

Work, I have found, is the only reliable cure for a broken heart, a broken sleep schedule, and a man who remembers your coffee order. I threw myself into all three problems by throwing myself at the first one, and for a few days, it actually worked.

Monday morning I opened the doors of the newly designated wellness suite — a converted sitting room in the east wing that I'd spent the weekend rearranging into something that felt less like a corporate office and more like a place a person might actually want to sit down and fall apart in — and I did not think about Arker Dalone for two consecutive hours. This felt like a personal achievement worth noting somewhere official.

My first client was a young pack member named Teo, barely twenty, working estate maintenance, who sat across from me with his arms crossed and his jaw set in the exact posture of someone who'd been told to be here rather than someone who'd chosen it.

"I don't really believe in this," he said, by way of introduction.

"You don't have to," I said. "You just have to show up for forty-five minutes and talk to me like I'm a person and not a corporate initiative. We can revisit belief later."

He almost smiled. By the end of the session, he wasn't crossing his arms anymore, and he asked, unprompted, whether he could come back next week instead of waiting for the assigned biweekly slot. I told him yes. I wrote a note in his file — *engaged once trust established, resistant to top-down framing, respond well* — and felt, for the first time since I'd driven through that gate, entirely and uncomplicatedly good at something.

That feeling carried me through the week. Word moves fast in a pack this size, faster than any marketing campaign I could have designed myself — by Wednesday, three more household staff had requested sessions who hadn't been on the original intake list. By Thursday, one of the senior kitchen staff, a woman named Ruth who'd been openly skeptical in the first staff briefing, stopped me in the hallway to say her daughter had used one of the coping techniques I'd outlined in a group session and it had actually helped, and then looked faintly embarrassed at how much she meant it.

I was good at this. I had always been good at this. It was, I realized somewhere around Thursday afternoon, the first time in three years I'd let myself feel proud of it in a room that used to be the site of my worst memory instead of somewhere safely far away from it.

Not everyone was thrilled about the momentum.

I heard about the first incident secondhand, from Priya, who delivered it with the careful neutrality of someone who knew exactly how it would land and had decided to soften the blow anyway. Bena had asked — casually, at breakfast, to one of the senior household staff — whether Morse Wellness's credentials had actually been verified, or whether the contract had gone through "a more personal channel." She'd framed it as concern. Due diligence. The kind of question that sounds responsible right up until you notice it's designed to plant a seed rather than answer one.

"Nobody took it seriously," Priya assured me. "Corrine actually laughed at her. Said your credentials were the most thorough she'd ever reviewed."

"But she asked it anyway," I said.

"She asked it anyway."

I filed that away too, in the same growing pile as the coffee cup and the rescheduled session and the quoted line from a meeting weeks ago — not proof of anything specific yet, just the accumulating weight of a pattern I recognized from every difficult client I'd ever worked with. People who feel a threat to their position rarely announce it directly. They ask small questions in the right ears and wait to see what grows.

I decided not to let it grow. I doubled down on the work instead, because the work was the one thing in this building I trusted completely, and by Friday I had eleven active clients, a waitlist forming for group sessions, and a reputation among the household staff that had shifted, in the space of a week, from *the consultant the Alpha personally requested* to, simply, *the woman who actually helps.*

I ran into Arker exactly once that week, in the corridor outside the estate gym at five in the morning, both of us in workout clothes, both of us clearly having chosen that hour specifically because we assumed no one else would be awake to see us there.

Neither of us said anything.

He held the door. I walked through it. We ran on separate treadmills fifteen feet apart for forty minutes without a single word passing between us, and it was, without exception, the loudest silence I have experienced in three years — every unspoken thing in the room taking up exactly as much space as it needed, which was all of it.

When I finished, toweling off, he was still running, eyes forward, jaw tight with the particular effort of a man who has decided not to look at something directly because he doesn't trust what he'll do if he does.

I left without saying goodbye. He didn't try to stop me.

I told myself that was for the best. I told myself that all the way back to my room, through a shower, through breakfast, through a full day of sessions where I was warm and present and entirely professional with every single client who wasn't him.

It was only that night, writing up my case notes, that I let myself admit the truth sitting underneath all of it: the silence in that gym hadn't felt like distance.

It had felt like restraint. His and mine both.

And restraint, I was beginning to understand, was a much more dangerous thing to be standing next to than indifference ever was.