Chapter Thirty-One: Lines of Demarcation
The question, once planted by Chloe's gossip, grew like a weed in the cracks of Amaya's concentration. His son? It was an impossible variable. A parameter that didn't fit the equation of Aris Rowon as she knew him. Marriage, fatherhood—these were messy, human entanglements, the very things he had always seemed to hold at bay with clinical disdain. The man who had rejected her for being a "distraction" had apparently allowed a far greater distraction into his life.
It made his cold professionalism feel even more like a personal indictment. He could manage a family, but he couldn't manage her.
The confusion over his role festered alongside it. Two days after their stilted meeting, she found herself standing once more outside Dr. Vance's office, gathering the courage to knock. This wasn't about personal history. This was about professional logic.
"Enter," Vance's gravelly voice called out.
Amaya stepped in. The office was a controlled chaos of papers and half-empty coffee mugs. Vance looked up, her expression suggesting Amaya was an item on a very long to-do list. "Snow. What is it?"
"Dr. Vance, it's about my supervisory assignment with Dr. Rowon." Amaya kept her voice level, factual. "I was reviewing the hospital's training protocol, and I have a question about the structure."
Vance leaned back, steepling her fingers. "Go on."
"As a psychology intern, my training is in assessment, psychotherapy, behavioral intervention. Dr. Rowon is a psychiatrist. His expertise is in diagnosis, psychopharmacology, the biological model. While there's overlap, our approaches and scopes of practice are distinct." She chose her words carefully, like placing surgical instruments on a tray. "Wouldn't the most appropriate senior guide be a clinical psychologist? Someone who can directly mentor me in the modalities I'm training to practice?"
Vance regarded her for a long moment, and Amaya had the distinct feeling she was being x-rayed. "You're questioning my judgement on supervisory placements, Snow?"
"No, ma'am. I'm seeking to understand the rationale. To optimize my learning." It was the right thing to say. Ambitious, not challenging.
A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched Vance's lips. "Practical. Good. Here's the rationale. This isn't a siloed academy. This is a hospital. Patients are complex organisms whose minds and brains are, despite what some of our more philosophically inclined colleagues might wish, inextricably linked. Dr. Rowon understands that link at a biochemical level you do not. He can teach you to read a symptom not just as a cognitive distortion or a behavioral pattern, but as a potential signpost to organic disease, medication side-effects, or neurological issues a psychologist might miss."
She leaned forward. "You think a psychologist should guide you? A psychologist will teach you how to talk. A psychiatrist like Rowon will teach you what to listen for. He will teach you rigor. He will tear your pretty psychodynamic formulations apart if they don't account for the hardware running the software. It will be unpleasant. It will make you a better clinician. That is the rationale. Any other questions?"
It was a brutally clear explanation. He wasn't there to guide her therapeutic hand; he was there to ensure her therapeutic mind understood its limits. He was the reality check. The gatekeeper to the medical model.
"No, Dr. Vance. Thank you for the clarification," Amaya said, her professional pride stung but her understanding complete.
"Good. Dismissed."
The gossip, however, was not so easily dismissed. It found fertile ground in the hospital cafeteria the next day. Amaya was picking at a salad, trying to focus on a journal article, when the group of other psychology and psychiatry interns at her table descended into a hushed, eager chatter.
"...so I heard it from Michelle in Peds," a talkative psychiatry intern named Ben was saying. "She was doing a rotation on the child psych ward last year when he was still at St. Jude's. She said he transferred his whole practice mid-year, pulled every string imaginable to get his son into the developmental disorders program here."
"He has a son?" another intern, Priya, breathed. "Dr. Rowon? I can't picture it. He's like... carved from marble."
"Oh, it's true," Ben said, savoring the attention. "Kid's around four or five, I think. Some kind of complex neurodevelopmental thing—selective mutism, severe social anxiety, maybe on the spectrum. Rowon is obsessive about it. He's not just the father; he's like the lead researcher on the case. Reads every paper, consults every expert. That's the rumor, anyway."
"Wow," Priya murmured. "So that's why he's so... intense. And so interested in our psychodynamic stuff lately? He's auditing some of the advanced child psychology seminars, I heard. He's looking for the best psychologist for his kid, not just a psychiatrist."
"That's the word," Ben confirmed. "He doesn't trust just anyone. He wants someone who can get past the medication and actually reach the kid. Makes sense, I guess. If your kid's mind is a locked room, you'd want the best lockpick in the world, not just someone who can sedate the person inside."
The metaphor hit Amaya like a physical blow. A locked room. Her eyes dropped to her plate, her appetite gone.
"So, is he married?" Priya asked the question burning in Amaya's own silent chest. "What's the wife like? Some super-genius neurosurgeon, probably."
Ben shrugged. "No one's ever seen a wife. No ring. Michelle said the kid's file only lists Rowon as the guardian. Sole custody. So... divorced? Widowed? No one knows. He's a vault."
A vault. The word echoed. He was a vault professionally. He was a vault personally. And now, apparently, he was a vault guarding another, smaller vault—his son's mind.
The gossip moved on, but Amaya sat frozen, the salad turning to cardboard in her mouth. A son. A child with a mind that was a mystery, a locked room his brilliant father couldn't pick. The irony was so profound it was cruel. Aris Rowon, the man who valued logic and control above all else, was helpless before the illogical, uncontrollable complexity of his own child's psyche. And he was searching, desperately it seemed, for a psychologist who could do what he could not.
He was looking for her. Or someone like her. A professional. A tool. A lockpick.
The revelation didn't soften him. It made him more terrifyingly human, and in doing so, made his coldness towards her feel even more deliberate. He had a whole hidden world of paternal devotion and desperate seeking. He had a heart, it seemed, but it was reserved for a tiny, silent boy. There was no room in that fiercely protected space for the ghost of the neighbor girl he'd left behind.
She stood up abruptly, dumping her barely-touched lunch in the trash. The noise of the cafeteria faded into a buzz. She had thought the game was a cold war of competence. She would become flawless to earn his professional respect, to negate his criticism.
But now she saw a different layer. His scrutiny of her work wasn't just about her being a defective intern. It was the scrutiny of a man searching for a specific kind of excellence. A specific kind of key. And every time he found her methodology lacking, every time he dismissed her differentials as shallow, he was judging her unfit not just as an intern, but as a potential candidate for the most important case of his life.
She wasn't just fighting for her career. She was unwittingly auditioning. And so far, in the eyes of Dr. Aris Rowon, she was failing the audition miserably.