A Greater Love
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6.1
The appointment was on a Thursday.
Shawanda had called three practices before she found one that could see Étain within the week. The one she settled on was a clinical psychologist named Dr. Patricia Hollis, whose office was in a medical building on El Camino Real in San Mateo. She had a specialty in adolescent psychology and personality disorders. Shawanda had read her credentials twice before calling.
She hadn’t told Étain what the appointment was for. She’d said it was a checkup. A routine evaluation. She’d said it the way she said things she wasn’t entirely sure of — carefully, without meeting her daughter’s eyes.
Étain had looked at her for a moment and then looked away and said okay.
She’d known it wasn’t a routine checkup. She’d known since the dinner at the Turners’, since the particular quality of the conversation that had happened behind the library door, since the way her mother had looked at her in the car on the way home — not the usual anxious surveillance but something different. Something that was trying to see her clearly for the first time.
She didn’t say any of this. She said okay and went to bed and lay awake for a while thinking about a billiard room and a flutter she still didn’t have a name for.
Dr. Hollis was a small woman in her fifties with reading glasses and the particular economy of movement that came from spending decades in rooms where words carried significant weight. Her office was clean and uncluttered. A window looked out on a courtyard. There were two chairs angled toward each other and a small desk along the wall and nothing on the surfaces that didn’t need to be there.
Étain noticed all of this immediately.
The first hour was Étain alone with Dr. Hollis. Shawanda sat in the waiting room with a magazine she didn’t read.
Dr. Hollis asked questions the way someone does when they already have a hypothesis and are testing it carefully. Not leading questions — open ones. What was a typical morning like. How did Étain make decisions about her day. What happened when she needed to choose between two things and her mother wasn’t available to ask. What did it feel like to be alone.
Étain answered honestly. She’d decided on the drive over that she was going to answer honestly, which was itself a decision she noticed herself making, which was itself something new.
She described the lunch line. The pasta sauce. The fork in the trail — not that specific incident, which hadn’t happened yet, but the general shape of what it felt like to stand in front of a choice with no one to tell her which way to go. Like the floor might give way, she said. Like something catastrophic was waiting on the other side of the wrong answer.
Dr. Hollis wrote something on her notepad.
“When you say catastrophic,” she said, “what does that look like in your mind? What’s the actual fear?”
Étain thought about it. “That I’ll be wrong,” she said. “And that being wrong will —” she stopped. “I don’t know. That something will end. That whoever I’m with will — leave.”
“Leave,” Dr. Hollis repeated. Not a question. Just the word, given back to her to look at.
Étain looked at it. “Yes,” she said.
“Has that happened?”
A pause. “My father left when I was three.”
Dr. Hollis wrote something else.
The second hour included Shawanda.
She came in and sat in the chair beside her daughter and folded her hands in her lap and looked at Dr. Hollis with the expression of someone prepared to defend something.
Dr. Hollis didn’t ask her to defend anything. She asked Shawanda to describe a typical day in their household. How decisions got made. Who chose what they ate, what they watched, what route they took to school. She asked these questions in a neutral tone that gave Shawanda nowhere to push against.
Shawanda answered. Carefully at first, then more openly, because the questions were specific enough that evasion would have required obvious effort and she was too tired for obvious effort.
Dr. Hollis listened to all of it. Then she was quiet for a moment, looking at her notepad.
“I’d like to share some observations,” she said. “And I want to be clear before I do that these are clinical observations, not judgments. Everything I’m about to say is in the service of helping Étain. Is that understood?”
Shawanda nodded. Étain looked at her hands.
“Based on what I’ve heard today,” Dr. Hollis said, “Étain presents with a significant cluster of symptoms consistent with Dependent Personality Disorder. DPD. It’s a recognized clinical condition listed in the DSM-5 — the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals.” She paused. “I’ll walk you through the criteria.”
She did. Each one named plainly, followed by a brief explanation of what it looked like in practice.
Difficulty making everyday decisions without excessive reassurance from others.
Needing others to assume responsibility for most major areas of life.
Difficulty expressing disagreement for fear of losing support or approval.
Difficulty initiating things independently due to lack of self-confidence.
Going to excessive lengths to obtain nurturance and support.
Feeling helpless and uncomfortable when alone.
Urgently seeking another relationship when one ends or is threatened.
Preoccupied with fears of being left to care for oneself.
With each criterion Dr. Hollis spoke, the air in the room changed slightly. Shawanda’s hands tightened in her lap. Étain kept her eyes on the window.
By the sixth criterion Shawanda’s jaw was set in the particular way it set when she was holding something in.
By the eighth she had stopped trying.
“She’s describing Étain,” Shawanda said. Her voice was quiet and flat. Not a question.
“Yes,” Dr. Hollis said.
The silence that followed lasted long enough that the sound of traffic on El Camino Real became audible through the window.
“How?” Shawanda said finally. The word came out stripped of everything except what it actually was — a mother asking how her child had come to this.
Dr. Hollis was quiet for a moment. When she spoke it was with the care of someone who understood that the next thing she said was going to land hard regardless of how carefully she said it.
“Dependent Personality Disorder doesn’t develop in isolation,” she said. “It develops in environments where a child’s opportunities to practice independent decision-making are significantly limited over an extended period. Where the consequences of choices are routinely managed by someone else. Where the message — not necessarily spoken, often unintentional — is that the world is too dangerous to navigate alone and that the child requires protection from it.” She paused. “The child’s nervous system learns this. It stops developing the capacity for autonomous decision-making because that capacity is never exercised. And over time the anxiety around independent choice becomes —” she chose the word carefully, “structural. Part of how the person is organized.”
Shawanda was very still.
“I want to be clear,” Dr. Hollis said. “This is not about blame. Parents who create these environments almost universally do so out of love. Out of a genuine desire to protect their child. The intent is never harm.” She paused. “But the impact—”
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