The clinic breathes softly at night.
Down the corridors, the emergency lights tint everything a pale blue, like water holding itself together.
Clara walks without sound. She counts in her head and denies it in the same thought.
The plaque 3B is shinier than the others. Maybe it's new. Or maybe not, she thinks, and hates herself for the "maybe."
She rests her fingers on the cold handle. The steel gives her heartbeat back. You're not really touching anything, she tells herself. It's only metal.
"You shouldn't be here," she murmurs, without turning.
He felt her arrive before any sound.
A pressure in his chest, as if his breath had found the measure of its own.
He stops one step behind her. Distance is a decision that weighs on his shoulders.
"And yet," he answers softly, "we're both here."
The corridor makes words lower than they are.
Clara turns her face a fraction. In the sliver of light, her eyes look like a thought that doesn't want to be said.
"Go back to your room, Adrian. This isn't a session."
"Then what is it?" he asks.
She lacks the ready answer.
The file with her name—VOSS, CLARA—weighs in her bag like proof or threat.
"A check," she says at last. "I open, make sure it's empty, and we go back."
"If it's empty," Adrian replies.
The skin on her arms tightens, as if cold had slipped in through a seam.
He could touch her wrist and pull her one step back. He doesn't.
He looks at her hand on the handle. The tendon tightening and releasing, as if she were bargaining with the door and with herself.
"May I?" he asks, laying his fingers beside hers, not quite touching.
The jolt between them is immediate: not electricity, something more stubborn.
He pulls away as if burned, then leaves his hand hovering, a breath away.
"Clara… don't," he says. "Not like this."
"Why?" Her voice comes out lower than she expected.
"Because I'm not sure I'd stop."
The words burn his tongue and relieve him at once, like a half-given confession.
She feels the sentence slide under her skin and take root.
She knows she should step back, restore roles, say "that's inappropriate."
Instead, she stays. Her forearm trembles; she hopes he doesn't see. She knows he does.
"I'm your therapist," she says, and it sounds like a lie told to a dead phone.
"And I don't want to hurt you," he answers. "That's different."
They look at each other in the glass pane of the door: two shapes side by side that don't touch, and a slower shadow behind them.
"Yesterday you said 'tomorrow,'" Clara murmurs. "This is it, isn't it? Tomorrow."
"With you," he says, "it's always tomorrow. It never ends today."
Closeness makes straight thinking difficult.
It isn't simple desire: it's a side effect of something neither of them can name.
"Tell me to leave," he asks, more to himself than to her.
Clara doesn't.
Her fingers graze the handle. He feels it on his own wrist without knowing how.
"What's behind it?" she whispers.
"What watched us in the mirror," he says. "And what you tried to forget."
She pulls her hand back. Sets it on her bag, opens it, takes out the file.
The emergency light makes it look pale.
She opens it.
White pages. One line, new, that wasn't there before:
Access authorized: Dr. Clara Voss — 03:17.
Her fingers clamp on the paper's edges. The kitchen clock. The half glass.
3:17. The number blows back at her like yesterday's draft.
"This is a joke," she says—to the page more than to him.
"It isn't," Adrian says, with no triumph in his voice. Only strain.
The file slips from her hand and thuds against the door, a soft sound.
The handle vibrates.
His body moves first: he reaches and stops her, two fingers on the back of her hand, light.
A minimal contact that makes too much noise inside.
He withdraws immediately.
"Sorry," he says. The word is a tight wire.
"Don't touch me," she answers on instinct. Then—in almost the same breath: "Don't go."
He closes his eyes for a second, as if he had to choose which command to obey.
"Say it again," he asks quietly.
"What?"
"That I shouldn't go."
"You shouldn't go."
The words change weight in the air.
He feels it. So does she.
"You said you don't want to hurt me," she whispers. "But you're taking my sleep."
"I know."
"And you're taking my name."
"I'll give it back."
"How?"
"By opening."
The simplicity disarms her more than any argument.
"And if there's nothing on the other side?" she asks.
"Then we'll have decided that," he says.
The answer angers her, but calms her. It reminds her a choice is still hers.
"Are you ready?" she asks.
"No," he says. "But I'm here."
He watches her mouth form a yes she doesn't say.
He steps half a pace back, as if to give her room, as if not to trust his own instinct.
"If we go in," he adds, almost promising himself, "I won't touch you unless you ask me."
His own words feel like a rope to hold on to.
He knows they might not be enough.
She settles her hand on the handle again.
His comes close, not overlapping: parallel. They don't touch. It's worse.
"On three," she says. "One."
Her breath skips a number.
"Two."
Adrian looks at her as if counting for her.
"Three."
The handle yields without a fight.
The door opens a few centimeters, the length of a doubt.
A faint smell—old paper and disinfectant—comes out like a memory.
Clara pushes.
The light inside is bluish, as if time had stayed curled up.
He sees the chair before anything else.
It's the twin of the one in the therapy room, but the posture of whoever sits in it isn't theirs.
A presence, still. A shadow with decisions.
"Clara," he says, and her name breaks in his throat.
She takes two steps in. Her eyes adjust.
The chair is turned three-quarters toward an inner pane.
Someone is seated.
The profile is clear enough to be familiar and blurry enough to deny it.
The person lifts their head, as if they had heard their name thought by someone else.
Clara hears her own voice come out of the dead intercom behind her:
"Doctor Voss, please take a seat."
The sentence echoes in the room like a ribcage.
Clara remains standing.
Adrian does not cross the threshold.
The figure in the chair turns just enough for the glow to draw the line of a face.
It is hers.
The handle behind her closes by itself with a polite click.