"What'd they do?" Jack asked, fearing the answer.
"Not what you think."
June 1912
"Why won't you just talk to me?" Dr. Erik Smith leaned forward, resting his chin in his hands. "You've been here for over a month now, and you've hardly said a word."
"That's not true," Rose said. "I told you from the beginning that I don't need to be here."
"If you don't need to be here, then why are you here?"
Rose sighed. "Because I was brought here."
"And why were you brought here?"
"Because it was easier to call me crazy then listen to me!" she snapped.
"No, that isn't why. You were brought here because you need help. You bit a cop in the face while he was trying to help you. That's not the sort of thing a sane woman does, is it?"
"He was touching me."
"And that makes what you did okay?"
"I'm sorry I hurt him. I really am. But you have to understand, I couldn't let him keep touching me." Rose's voice was laced with desperation. "I just…I just couldn't."
Erik shook his head. "Don't you see that you have a problem? Sane women don't respond like that when a man touches them." He leaned back in his chair.
"The only man I ever wanted to touch me is dead," Rose said bitterly.
"Didn't you say your father was dead?"
Fall 1915
Jack couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Oh, God, Rose, how'd you get out?"
"I didn't. At least not for awhile."
June 1912
"Where do you think these delusions come from?" Erik asked.
"They're not delusions!" Rose insisted. "I'm telling you the truth. I've been telling you the truth. You wanted me to talk so I did. For the past two weeks, all I've done is talk, but you're still not understanding."
"I'm trying to understand, but you're making it difficult. You refuse to admit that you suffer from delusions."
"But I don't!" Rose wailed in frustration.
"Miss Dawson, if that is indeed your name, first you come in here babbling incoherently, cut to ribbons and covered in bruises. The only sensible thing we can get out of you is your name. Then, for a month, you refuse to talk about yourself. You make me pry bits of information out of you with a verbal crowbar. Then, when you finally do begin to talk, you start insisting that your original name isn't Rose Dawson at all. You changed it to that in honor of your lover. Who died in the sinking of the Titanic. Who you met on said ship. While you were engaged to another, very wealthy man. A man, who incidentally enough, did lose his fiancée in the sinking." Erik leaned back in his chair. "Nothing about your story makes any sense. There is no way it happened."
"But it did!"
"If you refuse to admit your problem, that's fine, but you must know you can't leave until you do."
"Then I guess I'm never leaving," Rose said.