Page 129 of Letters From A Stalker

Her gaze travels over me slowly before returning to my face, one eyebrow rising with enough suspicion to qualify as interrogation. “No.”

I stop beside her desk and take a long drink of coffee. “Good morning to you too.”

“You look terrible.”

The concern is somewhere beneath the insult, but she no longer feels obligated to lead with it.

“Thank you. I made a special effort.”

“I can tell.” She leans back in her chair, studying me more openly as though she is deciding which theory will annoy me most. “Did you sleep at all?”

“Some.” The answer comes fast enough that neither of us believes it.

Mara’s eyes narrow. “That was suspiciously immediate.”

“I have a patient soon.”

“You have a patient in fourteen minutes, because unlike you, I know how clocks work.”

I start toward my office.

Her voice follows me. “Were you on the bike all night?”

“Not all night.”

A beat of silence lands behind me. “Kai.”

I glance over my shoulder and find her watching me with the expression of someone who has just been handed a far more interesting answer than the one she expected.

“No.” I clip.

“I haven’t asked anything yet.”

“You were about to, and I’m exhausted enough that preventing the question seemed more efficient.”

A smile spreads across her face. “That made it worse.”

“Fantastic.”

I open my office door.

“Asshole,” she calls after me, laughter already breaking through the word.

I lift my coffee in acknowledgment without looking back and disappear inside, grateful that at least one part of my life still functions exactly as it always has.

My first patient arrives several minutes later, and work does what it has always done well: it demands enough of me that everything personal moves to another room whether I want it to or not. For the next few hours, there is no Julia sleeping beneath a sheet or little handwritten note waiting on her kitchen counter. There are medication side effects, follow-ups, a patient convinced one difficult week erased months of progress and another whose answers tell me she is doing significantly worse than she admitted when we spoke two days ago. I listen because they deserve my full attention. I ask what needs asking and leave silence alone when silence is more useful.

There is something almost unsettling about how easily the parts of my life separate once the office door closes. I can sit here and be exactly the doctor I have always been while another version of me waits at home inside a black backpack with a balaclava that should probably be burned for several reasons. What I am doing with Julia hasn’t made me worse at my job. If anything, it has made me more rigid about every other boundary I have, as though knowing exactly how badly I am destroying one has turned me hyperaware of all the rest. That probably isn’t the reassuring fact I sometimes try to make it.

Shortly after noon, Mara knocks once against the frame of my open door and leans inside, her expression more businesslike than it was this morning.

“Renee’s on line two.”

I glance toward the phone. “Thanks.”

She starts to leave, then looks back at the coffee cup sitting near my keyboard.

“And eat something.”