I flipped on the television to drown out the screaming coming from the basement.

My head was pounding and I couldn't think straight. Emily was a murderer, and it was all my fucking fault. The girl was already a mess before any of this happened, and now she was going to have to live with what she had done for the rest of her life. I knew I wasn’t the most ethical psychologist, but I had enough experience to know that Emily was not a sociopath. The girl obviously had feelings, and she felt remorse—which meant this was going to weigh on her the rest of her life.

As horrified as I was by what she had done, there was no way I could turn her in. I just needed time to think. Time to figure out what I was going to do with her. I wanted to help her. I truly wanted her to get better.

I remembered the times that I happened to be at her mother's house while Emily was home on holiday from school. She would saunter into the kitchen and I would flirt with her, asking her about school and her friends, asking her how she had gotten to be so pretty. I had convinced myself at the time that it was innocent, but I know now that it was more than harmless flirting. I meant it at the time and I knew it. I wanted her then, and I still want her now. Even after what she’s done.

Even at the funeral, she showed an obvious interest in me and I still played along, leading her to believe that she could get me if she just acted grown up enough. I was playing games just as much as she was. But what I was really doing was playing with her life. I should have anticipated something would happen.

Emily thrilled me in ways that nobody else ever had. Not even her mother. I had been in love with Amelia, but she was different. She had a hardness to her that could never be softened, no matter how hard I tried. She seemed to thrive on the danger she put her own life in on a daily basis and the thrill of tricking me into being her drug dealer. Emily was never anything like her—and on top of it she had everything I loved about Amelia.

But she wasn't mine to toy with. She was and is a fucking child and she had known what she was doing that night. The night I may as well have fucked her while she watched her mother and me from the hallway. She had never experienced anything even close to love from either of her parents, and I took advantage of that. I’d taken advantage of plenty of patients throughout my career, but this was too much. It was all too much. I had no idea who the hell I was anymore.

I got up to fix myself a drink in the kitchen, and on the way back I stopped in the bathroom. I washed my face then ran my hand over a couple days of facial hair growth while I looked in the mirror. I hated the person I saw looking back at me. I didn’t know when I had become such a monster, but that’s exactly what I was. I wasn’t saving lives, I was ending them right and left.

I opened the medicine cabinet to find something for my headache and when I picked up one of the bottles of oxycodone to look behind it, I realized it was empty. I opened it up and was astounded to see that every pill was all gone. It was the highest mg dosage available and had to be used under close supervision. There had been enough in there to bring down a team of men.

When I returned to my den, I switched on the monitor so that I could see what Emily was doing in the basement. The thrashing had ceased, and I no longer heard her voice. When the screen displayed the scene downstairs, all I could see was Emily curled up in a ball on the floor, writhing and shivering with a pool of fluid collecting on the floor near her mouth.

She had taken the pills.

I rushed down the stairs and found Emily on the floor in a puddle of her own vomit.

“Emily!” I yelled, shaking her shoulders and slapping her face. Her head just bobbed from side to side and her eyes didn’t open. I picked her up and ran up the stairs with her in my arms. If she died I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.

I took her up to the bathroom and set her down on the floor, her body immediately slumping to one side up against the bathtub.

“Please don’t leave me, Emily!” I felt for her pulse and checked to see if she was breathing. “I need you!” Tears filled my eyes. “I need you to stay with me.”

She hadn’t been down there more than twenty minutes and she had to have taken the pills right before I had moved her back down there. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been to leave all those drugs in the bathroom where she had access to them. I wasn’t used to keeping any of the girls up here with me and it just didn’t occur to me to clean out the bathroom. Besides, I hadn’t even dreamed that she would try to kill herself.

I rummaged through the drawers and found a syringe and some naloxone, then set everything up next to her on the floor. She had a very weak pulse and I could barely detect any breath sounds so I gave her CPR for a minute, then filled the syringe and shot it into her arm. Within seconds she was gasping and shaking her head back and forth on the floor.

“Emily,” I yelled again. “Emily, you have to listen to me! Did you take all the pills in that bottle?”

Her eyes were still closed even though she was much more active—thrashing her arms and legs around.

“Emily!” I yelled as I slapped her face.

“Y-yes.”

I pulled her up into a sitting position and leaned her against the bathtub, then found something I could use to induce vomiting again.

“You have to take this, Emily.” I pulled her mouth open and got her to swallow some charcoal pills, then gave her another injection. She still had a lethal dose of opiates in her body and I needed to get as much out as possible before it all absorbed into her blood stream.

I held her for over an hour while she alternated between throwing up into the toilet and laying on the cold tile floor. Then when it seemed that everything was out of her system I cleaned her up and carried her to the bed.

“Max,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, Max.” Tears filled her eyes as she looked up at me.

“I know.” I brushed her hair back and kissed her forehead. “Don’t think about any of it now. Just rest.”

Emily closed her eyes and smiled.

“What are you smiling about?” I asked, my lips still hovering near her face.

“You kissed me.”

“Yes.” I closed my eyes and touched my forehead to hers. “I kissed you.”

I left her alone for a moment while I cleaned out the bathroom. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I took everything out of the medicine cabinet and drawers that could even remotely serve as a poison. As well as any scissors or anything sharp. I put everything in my room and locked the door that led from there into the bathroom, then spent the rest of the day sitting with Emily.

I checked her vital signs every hour to make sure she was okay. I felt completely responsible for everything. I hated myself for the way I treated her. I couldn’t just let my guard down. I had to make sure she knew her place with me first. I had been an utter bastard and I was going to do everything in my power to take care of her. Then, once she was better I’d figure out how the hell I was going to start acting like a fucking human being.