I Told My Therapist About My Stalker, but He Already Knew novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Right Questions

Eli cut his thumb on a gift latch, the doctor cleans it, and the barred seven he writes on a card matches thirty-one photographs.

"I left it open an inch," Eli said, "and I woke up at ten past four with it shut."

Dr. Vandermeer's pen stopped moving.

"Shut," he said. "And the latch?"

"Turned. The new one, the one that came in the paper bag." Eli held up his left thumb, which was wrapped in a grey strip of tape. "I'd put it in a drawer in April and never touched it. It was on the window frame, screwed in, and I cut myself testing it."

It was Thursday, six o'clock, and the lake outside the glass had gone black.

Eli had not slept more than two hours in a row since the notes started, and it showed in every line of his face.

"Tell me what you saw when you woke," the doctor said. "Only what you saw. Not what you think it means."

"The window was closed. The curtain hung straight. The air in the room was cold."

"Was the glass cold, or only the air?"

Eli blinked.

"The glass. It had fog on the inside, in a band. As if someone had stood close to it and breathed."

"And on the nightstand?"

"My water glass was moved. It's always on the left, and it was on the right."

"The side farther from the window," said Dr. Vandermeer.

"How did you know that?"

"Because you told me yesterday where your bed sits." The doctor turned a page. "Did the sheets smell of anything?"

Eli stared at him.

"You ask the strangest questions."

"I have evaluated stalkers for twelve years. The strange questions are the ones that find him."

"Not who he is, then. What he touched."

"What he touched tells me what he wants." Dr. Vandermeer capped his pen. "Give me your hand."

Eli held it out before he decided to.

The doctor took the bandaged thumb in both of his hands and peeled the tape back slowly.

The cut was a clean red line across the pad.

He took an alcohol swab from the desk drawer, and the cold of it made Eli hiss.

"Sorry," Dr. Vandermeer said, though his voice did not sound sorry at all.

His thumb settled on the inside of Eli's wrist and stayed there.

Eli felt his own pulse knock against it, hard and fast, and he knew the doctor could feel it too.

"Caffeine," Eli said.

"Of course."

The doctor did not let go.

His eyes were on the cut and not on Eli's face, and his breathing had stopped, a long second, before it started again.

Eli noticed that and put it in a drawer in his head marked tired.

"It's a good cut," Dr. Vandermeer said finally. "It will heal clean."

He pressed a fresh bandage over it with his whole palm.

For a moment neither of them moved.

Eli's hand lay in the doctor's, and the rain beat on the glass, and the room felt very small.

"You should not have to be this brave," Dr. Vandermeer said quietly.

Eli almost said it.

I'm not brave, he almost said. I left the window open because I wanted him to come in.

He closed his mouth on it instead.

"I want to give you something to do between sessions," the doctor said, and let go of him at last, one finger at a time. "A log. Every night for the next seven nights. When you wake, what time, what you hear, what has changed."

"A log."

"Written down, in your own hand. It helps."

"Helps whom?"

"You." Dr. Vandermeer pulled a card from the drawer and wrote on it.

Eli leaned forward to read it upside down, the way he read documents across a prosecutor's desk.

Next session: Monday, 4 p.m.

Log: 7 nights.

The doctor crossed the stem of the seven with a short bar, the way people did in Europe, with a small flick of the wrist.

Eli's eyes stopped.

He read the line again.

The doctor held out the card, and Eli took it, and it was almost steady in his fingers.

Every photograph that had come in six months had a date penciled on the back.

Eleven of them had a seven in the date, and every one of those sevens had a bar through its stem.

Eli had looked at those dates for hours, and he had never once thought of them as handwriting.

"Thank you," he said. His voice sounded quite normal.

"Monday," said Dr. Vandermeer, and held the door for him again.

The doctor's hand rested on the frame, long-fingered and perfectly still.

Eli looked at it all the way to the elevator.

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