Thursday. 3:55 PM. I changed my blouse twice. Put on the one I'd worn to the Columbia lecture — professional, high-collared, the opposite of the bar. Pulled my hair back. Notebook on my lap. Pen in hand. Glasses on, even though I only needed them for reading, because glasses said doctor and doctor said boundary.

He arrived at 3:59. One minute early. Not five, not ten. One. The kind of precision that suggested either anxiety or an internal clock that ran to the second.

He sat in the patient chair. The same way he'd sat at the bar — two stools away. Not too close, not too far. A calculated distance that felt uncalculated.

"Before we begin," I said, "I want to acknowledge that we have a prior personal interaction. I'm documenting it in your file. If at any point either of us feels the therapeutic relationship is compromised —"

"You can refer me out. I understand."

"Good." I clicked my pen. Dr. Cross was in control. Maren was watching through the glass. "Let's start with intake. Full name?"

"Eliot Voss."

I wrote it down. My handwriting was steady. A small victory.

"Occupation?"

"Independent financial consultant."

"And what brings you to therapy, Eliot?"

He thought about it. Not performing thoughtfulness — actually thinking. His gaze went to the window, then back.

"I have a feeling that my life has a pattern I can't see. I want to find someone who can."

I wrote: Presents with desire for self-understanding. Pattern recognition as primary concern. Good prognostic indicator.

"Can you describe what you mean by pattern?"

"I do things — the same way, every time. I'm very good at what I do. That's not ego. It's a fact that creates a specific problem." He paused. "When you're good at something, people stop asking if you should be doing it."

I wrote: Possible compulsive behavior pattern. May indicate workaholic tendencies or perfectionism as avoidance strategy.

"And you'd like to examine whether those patterns are serving you."

"I'd like to find out if they're still mine. Or if they started being someone else's a long time ago."

The session lasted forty-five minutes. Standard intake plus preliminary exploration. He answered every question with the kind of texture that made my clinical instincts hum — not scripted, not evasive, but layered. Like a man who'd thought about himself extensively and was choosing which floors to let me see.

At 4:44, I said, "That's our time."

He nodded. Stood. Walked to the door.

"Same time next week?" he asked.

"Same time."

He left. I sat in the chair and looked at my notes. Three pages. More than I usually write for an intake. My handwriting got smaller toward the bottom — a stress indicator I'd studied in graphology electives and now couldn't stop seeing in my own script.

My phone buzzed. Not from a saved number. From the nameless contact.

I can't stop thinking about Thursday.

I stared at the message. The word Thursday had two meanings now. Thursday the appointment. Thursday the night we would inevitably —

I should not have responded. The note was personal, not professional. Responding would collapse the boundary I'd spent twenty-four hours constructing out of clinical paperwork and ethical rationalizations.

I responded.

One hour later I was in his apartment. His hands on my waist. My glasses on his kitchen counter. The blouse from the Columbia lecture on his floor.

The therapy was four to five. This was not therapy.

I didn't know what this was. I only knew that for one hour I'd sat across from him with a notebook and tried to read him the way I read everyone, and I'd gotten — fragments. Edges. The outline of a shape I couldn't fill in. And the not-knowing was pulling me forward with a force I hadn't felt since I was twenty-three and still believed that understanding someone was the same as loving them.

I lay in his bed afterward. He was in the shower. I could hear the water running. My eyes traced his apartment — clean, minimal, no photographs. A bookshelf I couldn't read from this angle. A kitchen where everything hung on a magnetic strip, including a knife set that was better than mine.

My phone was in my jacket pocket in the other room. No FBI alerts tonight. No dead man's tie. Just a ceiling I didn't recognize and the sound of water and the knowledge that I'd crossed a line I'd drawn in permanent marker and called temporary.

I closed my eyes.

Dr. Cross would have something to say about this. Maren told her to shut up.