Qian finally understood why her mentor had suddenly sent her here to fill in. No matter how small a county hospital was, it shouldn’t be her turn to take a temp shift, right?

The whole point was to dump her here and force her to meet that Professor Qio or whatever his name was! 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

Right now Qian felt just like that patient who’d just been dragged in bound hand and foot—let me out of here!

But she was already on the pirate ship; getting off now wasn’t going to be so easy.

"The patient’s appointment time is almost here. We’ll lend you this department for now, you’ll find all the tools you need inside. Once she’s registered, you can start the consultation. If there are any other women or children who come, you can see them too. Your mentor highly recommended you to me, said you’re an outstanding psychologist! Honestly, what we lack most here is a good psychologist. We’ve got psychiatrists, but there are way too few psychologists doing adjunctive therapy—no one wants to come to a small hospital..."

For many psychiatric illnesses, treatment requires not only mandatory medication, but also a psychologist to help correct internal behaviors. Like that delusional patient who’d just been tied up and taken in—besides meds, he also needs psychotherapy. But uneven distribution of medical resources is a huge problem, and there’s not going to be any improvement in the short term.

Qian really didn’t have the mood to think about any of that right now. Her head was full of ways to gross Professor Qio out so he’d leave.

She was already here and the patient was about to arrive; having Qian bail at the last minute was impossible. Since the patient had made an appointment, she would take it seriously, she just hoped this patient would be quick so they could wrap it up fast, and she could slip away before that whatever-the-hell professor showed up.

She was honestly speechless about Mr Liu, that old lady. Was this menopause?

Plotting against her own student like this—how desperate was she to kick Qian out of the nest? And she could actually engineer such a low-tech "accidental encounter"...

Muttering to herself, Qian opened her makeshift office and walked in. It was just like any ordinary hospital room: a simple desk with a medical chart and a pen on it, and a single chair bolted to the floor on the other side. That was it, nothing else.

There was a brand-new white coat on the desk. Qian thought for a moment, then put it on.

She actually didn’t like wearing a doctor’s coat during sessions. For some patients, just seeing a doctor puts them under huge pressure; Qian preferred wearing regular clothes.

But today there was no helping it. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

It struck her that since she’d come back, she hadn’t put on a doctor’s coat even once. She took out her phone, set it on the desk, and snapped a timed photo of herself. Without a front camera, the angle from the phone propped on the desk came out pretty weird. Qian sent it to Yu Minglang via MMS to let him see what she looked like as a doctor.

Qian had just finished doing that when she heard a knock on the door.

"Come in."

A woman came in, fully armed: hat, mask, and huge sunglasses on her face, a purse hanging from her shoulder. Before entering she even looked warily behind her, as if checking whether someone had followed her.

Qian thought, done up like this, is she also some woman with delusional disorder? Is she afraid every day that someone’s out to get her?

But the director had just told her this patient had PTSD, right?

"You’re that supposedly experienced female doctor they talked about?"

"That’s me. I’m psychologist Chen Xiaoqian."

The woman took off her mask, but kept the sunglasses on.

The more Qian looked at her, the more familiar she seemed. Where had she seen her... Wait, could this be—?!

Wasn’t this Weiwei’s principal?

The one with terminal straight-male-cancer thinking, who believed women only get assaulted because they dress too revealingly and behave improperly, the one who took Ye Daqian’s money to smear Weiwei?

Qian remembered that Liumei had even saved her once—this principal had been walking through the park at night and got "xo’d" by a serial offender; her black-rimmed glasses had ended up at Qian’s place.

Later that perpetrator was caught, and supposedly confessed to several such cases. But very few female victims had reported it, and the principal hadn’t reported it either!

How could she be running into her here?

The principal sat down in the chair in front of Qian, hands crossed tightly over her little purse. She refused to take off her sunglasses or hat. She also found Qian a bit familiar, but couldn’t place her.

"Why’d they find me such a young doctor? Can you even treat people?"

"I have a national-level psychologist’s license." Qian just wanted to see how long it would take her to recognize her.

"Fine then, I’ll just grudgingly tell you about my situation... I, um, I, I..."

The principal stammered, clearly finding it hard to speak.

"Mm-hm, go ahead." Qian opened the chart and picked up her pen, ready to take notes.

"I—I was attacked by a dog."

"Oh?"

Qian looked up at her, then lowered her head again. "Go on."

"And then I’ve been in a daze every day, always feeling like someone’s following me. I have nightmares. Sometimes I hallucinate, feel like he’s right next to me."

Too embarrassed to say what had really happened, the principal claimed she’d been bitten by a dog.

"Concealing your condition from your doctor won’t help you. Please tell the truth."

"I was bitten by a dog, that’s what happened."

"Oh? And when it ’bit’ you, did your body have any special sensations? Was it painful, or pleasurable?"

"Pleas—No, how could being bitten by a dog possibly be pleasurable!" The principal denied it quickly, looking extremely guilty.

"I’ll say it again: at any time, you must trust your psychologist. You cannot hide your condition from your doctor. In here, with your doctor, there is nothing shameful, and nothing you can’t say."

To be blunt, Qian was extremely, extremely grossed out by this female principal. She had smeared Weiwei and given false testimony, she looked down on Liumei, despised Qiuqiu. Qian had even once wrung mop water into the principal’s food over this.

But that didn’t mean she would abandon a doctor’s baseline. No matter why she was sitting in this room wearing this white coat, no matter how much she was getting paid, as long as the person across from her was a patient, she would not ignore her.

Seeing that this principal was clinging to her pride and flatly refused to tell the truth, Qian’s patience was almost gone.

"I really was bitten by a dog! It wasn’t pleasurable, not at all. I hate that dog to death, why doesn’t he just die?! Of all the people he could’ve chosen, why me? He ruined me, ruined me..."

The principal covered her sunglasses and sobbed.

Her days had been utterly miserable lately. After that incident, she hadn’t told anyone, and she’d heard that devil had been brought to justice, but she still felt like everyone already knew her secret. Even worse, she dreamed of him every night...

This kind of cognition left her terrified and jumpy, seeing everyone around her as suspicious. On the one hand she hated herself for having a physical response to that kind of person; on the other hand she’d lost any enjoyment in having marital sex with her husband, even feeling that those three-minute rushed encounters with her husband were far, far inferior to that man...