I wouldn't think about any of it.
I was already thinking about it.
***
My last patient of the day was a hedge fund manager with anger issues and a marriage falling apart. He spent fifty minutes complaining about his wife's spending habits while carefully avoiding any discussion of the affair I suspected he was having. I nodded in the right places, asked the right questions, and felt nothing at all.
After he left, I locked up the office with the same routine I'd followed for three years. Check the windows. Check the back door. Set the alarm. Test the handle twice. Old habits, the kind that became muscle memory when you'd spent enough of your life looking over your shoulder.
Margaret, my receptionist, had already gone home. The waiting room was dim and silent, chairs empty, magazines untouched. I stood there for a moment longer than necessary, listening to the quiet, before I finally left.
The walk home was twelve blocks. I could have taken a cab—it was February, and the wind cut through my coat like it had a personal grudge—but I liked the walk. Liked the movement, the cold, the way the city swallowed me into its crowds. In New York, everyone was anonymous. Everyone was running from something. I was just another woman in a dark coat, head down, moving fast.
I'd chosen this city for that exact reason. Far enough from Chicago to breathe. Big enough to disappear.
My apartment was on the fourth floor of a prewar building on the Upper East Side—nice but not flashy, the kind of place that saidsuccessful professionalwithout invitingquestions. I'd decorated it the same way I'd built my practice: carefully, strategically, with nothing that revealed too much.
No photographs on the walls. No art that meant anything. Bookshelves lined with psychology texts and novels I'd bought by the yard at a used bookstore, chosen for their spines rather than their contents. A kitchen I barely used. A bedroom with a view of the building across the alley.
A life that could be packed into two suitcases and abandoned in an hour if necessary.
I dropped my bag by the door and went straight to the kitchen, pouring myself a glass of wine I probably shouldn't have. The first sip burned going down, and I leaned against the counter, letting the silence settle around me.
This was the hardest part of every day. The hours between work and sleep, when there was nothing to do but exist in my own company. I'd gotten better at it over the years—learned to fill the time with books, with cooking, with the kinds of solitary hobbies that didn't require other people—but it never felt natural. It felt like holding my breath. Like waiting for something I couldn't name.
My phone buzzed on the counter. I glanced at the screen and felt my stomach drop.
Chicago area code.
I didn't answer. Didn't even pick it up. Just watched it ring, four times, five, until it finally went to voicemail. The notification appeared a moment later:New voicemail from unknown caller.
I deleted it without listening.
There was nothing anyone in Chicago could say that I wanted to hear. I'd made that clear years ago, when I'd packedeverything I owned into my car and driven east until I hit the ocean. I'd changed my name, built a new life, become someone else entirely. Whoever was calling—whatever they wanted—it didn't matter. That part of my life was over.
I poured myself more wine and told myself I believed it.
***
Dinner was leftover pasta eaten standing at the counter, a book propped open in front of me that I wasn't really reading. My thoughts kept drifting back to the session. To him.
Zelenov.
Even the fake name had a certain elegance to it. Russian, obviously. He'd had the faintest trace of an accent—not in his words, which were pure American, but in the rhythm of his sentences. The way he paused before certain phrases, like he was translating from some internal language I didn't speak.
I wondered what his real name was. Wondered what he really did, because "investments and development" was the kind of vague answer people gave when they didn't want you to look too closely. Wondered what—or who—had put those shadows under his eyes.
None of your business. He's a patient.
I washed my dishes, wiped down the counter, checked the locks on my door twice. Then I sat on my couch with my wine and my book and tried very hard to think about something else.
It didn't work.
He'd been so careful, so controlled, that every moment the mask had slipped felt like a gift. When he'd admitted he didn't remember feeling rested. When he'd said "fine" in that flat voice that meant anything but. When he'd paused, just for asecond, before answering my question about his family, and I'd seen something flicker across his face—grief, maybe, or guilt, or some combination of the two.
I'd wanted to push. To dig into that pause, to find out what was buried beneath it. But I'd held back, the way I always did in first sessions. Built rapport before building pressure. Let them think they were in control before showing them they weren't.
Except I wasn't sure who was in control in that room. He'd deflected my questions with the ease of long practice, but he'd also watched me—really watched me, with an intensity that had nothing to do with flirtation and everything to do with assessment. Like he was trying to figure out if I was a threat.
