Love at First Fight - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Seven

When your tooth gets knocked out, you visit a dentist. When you break your arm, you visit a doctor. When you start hearing voices, you visit a psychiatrist. Easy. Simple. Normal. That was what they told me.

I could still remember the arguments—late at night when they thought I was asleep. I could remember lying in bed, listening as the voices of my family cracked and creaked through the floorboards, all of them fighting for the same thing, but none of them quite sure where to throw a punch.

Scout had actually done most of the yelling. If the walls had been just a little bit thicker and my ears had been just a little less focused, I might not have heard him screaming at my father. I might not have heard my father screaming back. Maybe I wouldn't have heard Dad call Scout inexperienced and maybe I wouldn't have heard Scout call Dad irresponsible.

Maybe a lot of things wouldn't have happened if I didn't hear everything, but I do, and no one can tune out the sounds of Zachary Goode and Scout Jasons fighting for someone they love.

It had taken a lot of fights—a lot of loud nights with a lot of different people—but in the end, Mom was on Scout's side and, in the end, Mom always won.

And so the decision had been made. The start of the school year would also mark the start of my treatment—my path to healing, as Aunt Liz had so eloquently put it. The whole thing felt like a poorly written line from a pamphlet in a hospital waiting room, but Dad was worried. Scout was worried. Despite what the last two years may have you believe, Mom was worried, so I had agreed, not because I thought that it would help me, but because I knew that it would help them.

Mom had picked the psychiatrist. She had connections in that world. She had graduated from Georgetown. She had written her master's thesis at Harvard. She was apart of the most elite scholars—people who knew the human brain as well as they knew their own hands. People she could trust and respect. People who wouldn't screw around with my head, just because I was the daughter of Cameron and Zachary Goode.

I liked that. I liked thinking that there was someone out there who didn't care that my last name was Goode.

Doctor Phineas O'Reilly looked a lot like his son—red hair, freckles, too tall for his own good. His eyes were what Finn's might be, blue as the sky and dreamier than the heavens, framed behind a pair of bright red glasses. When I walked into that temporary office at the very back of the Gallagher Academy medical wing, his sleeves were rolled up and his shirt was untucked. His thin tie hung looser than that of any medical professional ever should, and he grunted as he dropped a stack of boxes out of the way.

I knocked on the wooden frame of his door. The way he spun around told me that he didn't have the same training I did. "Morgan," he said, taking a peak at his watch. "You're early."

His accent was different from Finn's—born Ireland, but probably went to school somewhere in south England. Not a spy, but a man of the world all the same. He wore his watch around his left wrist, making him right handed, and he was very clearly extroverted. I could feel it as soon as I walked in. He was easy to read—easy to predict. I could see why my mother had picked him.

"Would you have rather I'd been late?" I asked him.

He looked around at the piles of dusty boxes like maybe the answer was yes, but he managed to sound somewhat confident when he answered, "No. Notta bit. Here—" He shifted a few boxes until they lined up flat against one another, then gestured to it as if it were the finest chair in the world. "Sorry that I can't be more accommodating."

"Not exactly the corner office, is it?"

"I'll take what I can get," he told me. "I'm lucky to have any office."