The room had a window that pretended to be a wall.
Adrian watched it the way you watch a closed throat, waiting for the swallow. The pane ate the light and gave back a thinner version, a ghost of the room. If someone stood behind it, he couldn't see them. He could only see himself, and the suggestion of Clara beside him, edited into reflections.
She set the folder down without looking at the glass. "Today I'd like to run a short perception exercise," she said. "We call it the mirror test."
"You're not going to ask me who I am, are you?" His mouth almost smiled. "I'm tired of names."
Her pen hovered, then lowered. "No. Not who. Where. Where are you when you look at yourself?"
He let the question sit. The air had the taste of new coins, metal and thumbprints. Somewhere down the hall, a trolley squeaked, turned, and the squeak changed pitch as if the floor itself had a slope.
Clara moved a fraction closer to the glass. Not enough to call it near. Enough that the outline of her shoulder found its echo in the pane. The light drew a line along her jaw. He felt the line in his throat.
"Stand here," she said softly.
He did. Their reflections aligned and failed to. In the glass, he was a man with tidy damage and eyes that didn't explain themselves. She was the color that happens to gray when it forgives itself.
"Describe what you see," she said.
"You've tied your hair back tighter than yesterday," he answered, immediate. "It's not for me. It's for the room."
Her breath paused, barely. "And yourself?"
He let the silence shave him. "I look like someone who should be further away."
She wrote something down that had more meaning than ink. "What about the space between us?"
He watched their not-quite-overlapping reflections. "Measured," he said. "Like a bridge they haven't opened yet."
"And if we closed it?"
"Then we'd find out if the river was real."
Her eyes met his in the glass, not in the air. The distance stayed exactly the same and changed anyway.
"Focus on your breathing," she said, voice steady. "Slow."
He obeyed; the room did too. He could hear the fluorescent bar above them take longer to hum. He could hear the paper on her clipboard roughen as sweat from her palm turned its fiber to soft stone. He could smell rain without windows.
"You know that scent," he said.
"What scent?"
"Whatever you pretend the building smells like. It's you, not here."
She didn't answer. He didn't need her to.
"Adrian," she said after a while, "I want you to tell me what's behind the glass."
"You," he said.
Her mouth made the shape of a smile and didn't do it. "That isn't how one-way mirrors work."
"Neither do we."
He leaned a little closer. The glass cooled the room by the width of a breath. In the reflection, Clara lifted her chin a degree she hadn't meant to. He knew the angle like a road he'd walked at night: the angle you take when you want to stay taller than fear.
"Who do you expect to be watching?" she asked.
"The person with the key," he said. "Or the person who thinks they took it."
"And which are you?"
"I'm the door."
The pen stilled. The sentence put its hands on her shoulders the way numbers do when they belong to you. He could feel her pulse correct itself, as if it had been caught doing something personal.
"Adrian," she said, softer now, "tell me what happens if I turn off the lights."
"You won't."
"Why?"
"Because in the dark we would stop pretending what this is."
"What is this?"
He let the answer arrive like weather, not like a photograph. "A conversation that keeps choosing our bodies as a shortcut."
The fluorescent bar ticked once; the sound made a circle in the air and came back to them smaller. She stepped to the desk, set the folder down, then returned with the clinical slowness of someone who knows speed makes things worse. When she stopped, the space between them had learned a new word.
"Close your eyes," she said.
He closed them.
"What do you see?"
"You," he said. "Not your face. The way you stand in a room. You leave your weight on your right foot and pretend you don't. You count inside any silence longer than a sentence. You cut your hair when you decide to forgive something."
He could hear her swallow. The sound touched his lower lip, as if the room had lips.
"Open," she whispered.
He opened. For a heartbeat, the glass didn't show him; it showed the suggestion of him from behind the glass, as if there had always been two sides and he had been on the other one all along. When the world corrected itself, he missed the mistake.
"Again," she said, but it wasn't an instruction. It was a thought that had escaped. She steadied it. "Describe what you'd say to the person behind the mirror."
"I'd ask them if they're counting the steps to get here."
"How many?" Her voice hardly moved.
"Seventy-two," he said.
Her fingers tightened on the clipboard. The reflected knuckles whitened before the real ones did, like the glass wanted to go first.
"You said that yesterday," she managed.
"I remembered it today."
He let his gaze stay on the pane and not on her. The reflection spared them the honesty of directness while giving them another. In the glass, he could stand closer than the air would permit. He did. The room felt it anyway. She didn't step back. The distance changed its name.
"What do you want from this exercise?" she asked.
"To see what you look like when you stop being just professional," he said. "It's a mask that fits too well. It leaves marks."
Her mouth opened and found caution inside it. "That isn't part of your treatment."
"No," he said. "It's part of yours."
The sentence landed between them like an object. They didn't touch it. They let it alter gravity.
Something flickered behind the glass, nothing the eye could swear to, something the skin could. Adrian turned his head a fraction, listening with parts of him that didn't have names.
"Who else is in this room?" he asked.
"No one," she said automatically.
"Then why did you leave the door almost closed, not closed?"
Her attention glanced, involuntary, at the door: not latched, sitting in its frame with the kind of gap a palm could change to open. In the reflection, the gap looked like a mouth that had been polite for too long.
"Because I like exits," she said.
"You don't like elevators," he reminded.
"And you don't like being read," she returned.
"I like being understood," he said. "Those are different things."
For the first time that day, she smiled in a way that used her eyes. It was quick and gone, but it took him with it for the length of itself.
"Let's try something else," she said, and reached past him for the switch on the wall. She didn't flip it. The reach was enough. Her sleeve whispered against the air near his wrist. His skin recognized a language it had been taught in another life.
"Don't," he said.
"Because of the dark?"
"Because I already know what I'd do."
"And what would you do, Adrian?"
He looked at the glass. In the pane, a version of him leaned in and said something to a version of her that only they could hear. Out here, he chose a different risk.
"I'd tell you the truth," he said.
"Which is?"
"That you smell like rain after it stops," he said quietly. "That you never drink the second half of your coffee. That your voice is a place. That if I took one more step, we would both have to stop pretending I'm the only patient in this room."
The fluorescent bar hummed like a held note. Somewhere, a door closed with exquisite manners. The pen in her hand didn't move. Neither did she.
He waited. Waiting had become the shape of him.
"Session's over," she said at last, but the sentence wore the wrong clothes. She didn't reach for the door.
"How many stairs did you take on your way up?" he asked.
She looked at the glass to avoid looking at him. In the reflection, her answer arrived before she spoke.
"Seventy-two," she said.
He nodded. "You were almost there."
Her eyes met his, in the pane this time, where honesty could pass for its reflection. For a breath that forgot to end, the room had no furniture, only a line between two people and the knowledge of how easy it would be to cross.
She broke it first. "Tomorrow, same time."
He stepped back, and the air regained permission to be air. "Tomorrow," he said.
At the door, she hesitated, then did what people do when the body wants to learn the truth faster than the mind: she turned half toward him, as if the other half could be forgiven later.
He didn't speak.
She left.
The room remembered them for a few seconds after they were done, the way linens remember a shape. Adrian stood in front of the glass until the version of him on the other side grew bored of waiting.
He wrote three words in his head and didn't touch the pen:
Don't turn on.
Then he did what he'd told her he would not: he reached and flipped the switch.
The light did not go out.
It changed color, just a degree toward rain.
And in the pane, for the brief width of a heartbeat, he saw a third reflection that wasn't either of them, watching.