Clara hadn't planned to count them.
She never did.
But when she left her office that evening, the number came uninvited: one, two, three… seventy-two.
She stopped on the last step, breath tight.
Adrian's voice echoed cleanly in her skull: Because you count the stairs.
She told herself it was coincidence.
Coincidence was what rational minds used when the world refused to behave.
The corridor lights buzzed with that tired hum she had started to hate. The clinic was half-asleep: nurses whispering, monitors sighing behind closed doors.
Her reflection in the glass of the stairwell door looked older than the woman she remembered being this morning.
She walked to the staff lounge. The coffee machine gurgled in protest as she pressed the button.
Black coffee. Always black.
The first sip burned the roof of her mouth. She barely tasted it.
On the table lay a patient file she didn't remember leaving open.
Not Adrian's, someone else's.
Name: Voss, Clara.
Status: Follow-up required.
Her pulse tripped. She picked up the file.
Empty.
Every page inside was blank except for the header repeated on each: Session Notes.
She ran her thumb along the edges, clean, unused.
A trick? A mistake?
Someone's idea of humor?
She shoved the folder back into the cabinet, hard enough to rattle the others.
"Long day?"
The voice behind her made her spin. Dr. Rinaldi stood by the door, tie now in his pocket. His smile was polite, but his eyes did the math of people.
"Just finishing notes," she said.
"You look pale."
"Fluorescent lighting." She forced a laugh. "It flatters no one."
He nodded slowly, watching her too carefully. "Adrian's progress is… unusual."
Clara's throat tightened. "In what sense?"
"He remembers patterns, not facts.
When I asked him to recall faces, he described colors instead: blue, grey, gold. Then he said stairwells."
Her hand shook around the cup. She hoped he didn't see.
Rinaldi rubbed his jaw. "I'd like to sit in on your next session, if you don't mind."
"I do mind," she said too quickly. "It affects the dynamic."
He accepted the refusal with a shrug, but his expression lingered longer than courtesy required. "Of course. Still… keep your door open, Clara. Even for the small things."
He left her with that sentence, keep your door open, like advice or warning, she couldn't tell.
She stayed in the lounge until the hum of the building sank into her bones. Then she packed her bag, checked the hallway twice, and went down the same staircase she had counted earlier.
She didn't count this time.
She tried not to.
Outside, the sky over Milan hung heavy, low enough to press on the roofs. The air smelled like rain that hadn't decided yet. Her car waited under the yellow lamp, familiar and foreign at once.
She unlocked it, got in, and turned the key. The radio came alive on static, then a voice.
Not music.
Not news.
"Seventy-two steps," the voice whispered through the interference.
"You were almost there."
Clara froze.
The static swallowed the sentence as fast as it had spoken it.
She shut the radio off, sat still, and realized her hand was shaking hard enough to make the key tremble in the ignition.
She didn't drive home immediately.
She looked at the stairwell through the rear-view mirror.
Somewhere behind the windows, a light flickered once, like a heartbeat deciding whether to continue.
When she finally reached her apartment, everything looked correct: keys in the bowl, shoes aligned, plants alive.
Normal was supposed to feel safe.
Tonight, it felt rehearsed.
She poured another coffee she didn't need and sat at the kitchen table, notebook open.
She wrote Adrian on the first line.
Then stairs, hair, mirror.
Then she stopped and added one more word, slower than the rest: me.
She stared at the page until the ink dried unevenly, like breath on glass.
Outside, the rain finally started.
Seventy-two drops, maybe.
She wasn't going to count.