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I don't take her. I want to, the warm weight of her like a tether to something that isn't scared, but you can't take a dog into a grocery store, and anyway if this goes bad, I don't want it to go bad with her watching. Shoes. Hoodie. I pull the hood up like it's armor, like a layer of cotton is going to do a single thing about the fact that I am about to walk into the open on the twenty-fifth of October.

His voice is in my head before I decide to put it there. The low register. You're not trying to not be afraid. You're trying to do the thing while you're afraid. Those are different. The second one is possible. He said it three or four calls ago, about the walks, about the four seconds past Ellis's sensor, and it lives in me now next to the breathing counts and the trazodone and everything else that's supposed to work and mostly doesn't.

This one might.

Down the stairs. Through the glass lobby. Out. The air hits and it's October air, cold at the edges, wet leaves and somebody's woodsmoke, and the street is dressed for the holiday the way it is every year except this year I'm in it instead of behind a deadbolt watching the light change through a gap in the curtains. The Delgados' skeleton sways on its wire. I keep my eyes on the sidewalk, on the cracks, on my own shoes, and I count them the way I count his pauses. I do not look at the lawns.

The store is worse than the street, because the store is bright and crowded and committed to the bit. There's a cardboard witch the second I walk in, animatronic, and when a kid trips the sensor she cackles and her head cranks around and my body locks, full stop, the breath caught behind my sternum, and for one second, I am six years old in a basement with the door shut and my brothers laughing on the other side of it.

And then I'm not. I'm a twenty-seven-year-old man holding a plastic basket, and the witch is forty dollars of molded plastic on a seasonal endcap, and the kid who set her off is already three aisles away negotiating for fruit snacks. I breathe. Three in, three out. I find the pet aisle by the signs hanging from the ceiling, no looking left or right, and I grab the right brand, the one that doesn't wreck her stomach, and then a second bag because I am never fucking doing this again, and then the dental sticks she likes, because if I'm going to storm a grocery store for a twelve-pound tyrant I am at least coming home with the good stuff.

The self-checkout has a jack-o'-lantern taped over the screen. I ring everything up around it. The machine tells me to place the item in the bagging area in a voice with no idea what today is costing me. I place the item in the bagging area. I pay. I go.

Four blocks back. The skeleton. Ellis's thing goes off as I hit the end of the block and the laugh track rolls and my pace doubles, and my hands are full so I can't do anything with them except strangle the bags until the plastic bites my fingers, and then I'm past it, and then I'm at the lobby, and then I'm inside, three locks, handle deadbolt handle, and I slide down the inside of my own front door and sit on the floor with forty pounds of dog food in my lap and shake.

Bean climbs into the gap between the bags and my chest and puts her nose under my jaw.

"I did it," I tell her. My voice isn't steady. My hands aren't steady. But the bowl is going to be full, and I did the thing while I was afraid, and those are different, but the second one is possible, and I have proof now. Forty pounds of it, in my lap, smelling like kibble and a war I won.

I feed her. I wash my hands. I sit on the kitchen floor while she eats, and the thing I notice, the thing that actually stops me, isn't the witch or the skeleton or the four blocks. It's that the entire time I was shaking against my door, the only thing I wanted, the first thing, was to tell him about it.

I can't wait until midnight.

I walk Bean at dusk, the shorter route, the one that only passes Ellis's once. The sky is the color of a bruise at the edges, purple bleeding into the orange that October does to sunsets, and the orange doesn't bother me as much as it should because my brain is somewhere else. My brain is on a voice. On a question about spines. On the way he said what does it feel like as if the answer mattered to him personally, not professionally, as if he wanted to know for the same reason I wanted to tell him.

The skeleton goes off. My body does the thing. Four seconds past the yard, breathing in threes, Bean pulled tight. Then we're past it and the evening opens up into the flat, manageable stretch between sundown and midnight.

Midnight. The word has a weight now. Midnight used to mean the worst part of the night, the hours between the last distraction and the first sign of dawn, the window where the panic lives because the dark is the dark and the dark is where the thing happened and the thing lives in the dark the way mold lives in walls, present even when you can't see it, growing in conditions you can't control.

Now midnight means his voice.

I shower at 11:15. I put on clean clothes. Not for any reason. A phone call doesn't require clean clothes. But I change the shirt I've been wearing since morning for one that's softer, a gray one that I haven't worn in weeks, and I catch myself in the bathroom mirror doing this. The person in the mirror is a man getting dressed for a phone call with a crisis line operator he's never seen. The absurdity should be enough to stop me.

It isn't.

I brush my teeth. For a phone call.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Bean is on the couch. I sit on the floor with my back against the couch, phone on speaker balanced on my thigh. At 12:01 I dial. The line picks up on the second ring. His voice says hey. My whole body exhales.

Not "Harbor Crisis Center, this is Brantley." Not the professional greeting. Just hey. The way you'd answer a call from someone you were waiting for.

We've stopped pretending this is professional. I don't know when it happened. Somewhere between the first call and the sixth the language shifted. He stopped saying how are you doing tonight and started saying how was your day. I stopped opening with the phobia and started opening with the novel. The crisis line is still the vehicle, still the phone number I dial, still the system that routes me to his headset at midnight, but the conversation inside the vehicle has outgrown it.

"I left the apartment today," I say. I don't plan to lead with it. It just comes out, the way everything comes out with him now, before the part of me that curates gets a vote.

"Yeah?" The pitch lifts. The real interest, not the operator interest. "Where'd you go?"

"The grocery store. Bean ran out of food and the delivery app went down and I had to actually leave the building. Four blocks. In October." I hear how small it sounds out loud, a grown man announcing he bought dog food. "There was an animatronic witch. We had a moment."

He laughs, low, and then he doesn't lob a joke back, which is the thing he does that undoes me. He takes it seriously. "That's not small, Milo. That's enormous. You know that, right?"

"It felt enormous. From the inside."

"It was." A beat. "You did the thing while you were afraid."

The words are mine now, except they were his first. He said them to me three calls ago and I used them at my own front door with forty pounds of kibble crushing my arms, and now he's handing them back like he's been carrying them around the same way I have.