CHAPTER ONE

      PHYSICAL BRUISES HEAL. It’s the mental ones that can kill you. Bloom shook her head and hit the delete key. Looked for a more genteel way to get her point across. She didn’t want to lose her audience during the first minute of the two-hour-long psychology symposium. They’d given her a room with seating for three hundred, which could feel cavernous if she failed to entertain.

      Back in her old life, her teaching life, she’d have filled the screen with visual aids, provided a handout—and probably pens, too. She’d have sent around a bowl filled with individually wrapped peppermints. All actions designed to increase memory retention in lecture situations, and she’d have been content to get 5 percent retention after seven days.

      But those were the old days. Her associate college professor days. Funny how so much could change in just three years.

      Physical bruises heal. It’s the mental ones that can kill you. Her second try ended up exactly the same as the first.

      And if she started her keynote address at the psychiatric conference that way, people might not physically exit in droves, but she might lose her credibility.

      One in four of the audience members—the current statistic for the number of the victims of domestic violence in the United States—might even take offense. Get angry.

      How could she belittle the bruises that took so many lives? How could she say that “bruises heal,” dismissing the fact that intimate partners lifted fists to those who loved them?

      She had two hours to impress upon her peers the very real disease that ate away at more of the population than any other disease. Domestic violence.

      Medical personnel had been made more aware of intimate partner violence in recent years. After all, some professional sports leagues had been forced to shine light on the problem as a way of warding off the negative press that resulted from some of their stars being abusers.

      But the fact that every minute twenty-four people were victims of intimate partner abuse in the United States was not just a problem for police and hospitals, doctors and nurses. Her profession—psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors—needed to step up to the plate.

      Because bruises, broken bones, even cracked skulls healed over time. But without awareness, without help, without a “movement” to tend to the mental bruises left by domestic violence, not enough of the victims of that violence were going to heal...

      The soapbox is not going to work with these people.

      Bloom’s self-talk was trying to help. She knew that.

      But...unhealed mental wounds often drove victims to the other side—they became abusers.

      Preaching, teaching, prophesying or statisticizing wasn’t going to reach her peers.

      She deleted again.

      Sitting behind her mahogany desk, Bloom looked over the top of her laptop screen to survey her office, as though the words she needed were there. The couch and two recliners that faced each other with her favorite old claw-footed chair—an inheritance from the maternal grandmother she’d adored—offered...nothing. There was the coffee table with a floral tissue box holder in the middle of it. Wall hangings, all carefully chosen, in shades of muted reds, oranges, yellows, a splash of purple. Some hearts quilted together. Some quotations in the midst of abstract art.

      Clearly a woman’s office. She made no apology for that. She was a woman.

      Her patients were predominantly women.

      A lot of whom were living healthy, productive lives.

      But there were so many more out there. And she was booked to the hilt. Beyond the hilt, really, not that she minded the evening hours she put in three nights a week in addition to fully booked days.

      Dr. Bloom Freelander, Psy.D, had a thriving private practice.

      And it wasn’t enough.

      She couldn’t even come close to serving the needs of all of those calling her office for help.

      Nine o’clock on a Wednesday night. Her last patient had been gone almost an hour. Susan, her receptionist, soon after that. She had a 7:00 in the morning—Latoya Markham, who had to be at work by 8:00 a.m. And here she sat, needing to write the speech that she’d be giving at the University of California in just two days.

      Physical bruises heal. It’s the mental ones that can kill you.

      No!

      The truth was...true. Physical bruises did heal. In some fashion. They’d fade and disappear. Broken bones reset. Some attacks resulted in death, too. It was the most unfortunate fact of all. One that she was trying desperately to avoid as often as humanly possible. The way to prevent domestic