Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Unraveling Hour
The first scheduled supervisory meeting was at 2 PM in Dr. Rowon's office. Amaya spent the morning in a state of detached automation. She attended to her patients, took notes, and responded to queries, all while a quiet, high-pitched scream echoed in the hollow of her chest. The hands on the clock seemed to both drag and race.
At 1:58 PM, she stood outside the door marked Dr. A. Rowon – Consultant Psychiatrist. The nameplate was sleek, modern, impersonal. She smoothed the front of her simple blue blouse and charcoal trousers, her professional uniform. Her hair was pulled back in a neat, low bun. She had armored herself in competence.
She knocked, the sound sharp in the quiet hallway.
"Enter."
His voice. Deeper, perhaps. Even more devoid of inflection. It was a command, not an invitation.
She pushed the door open.
The office was what she expected. Neat. Sparsely decorated. Textbooks and journals lined the shelves with military precision. The desk was clear except for a computer monitor, a closed file, and a single, expensive-looking pen. The light from a large window fell across the room, illuminating dust motes dancing in the sterile air.
And him.
He was standing by the window, looking out, his back to her. He wore a white coat over a dark shirt and trousers. He was taller, broader in the shoulders than her memory had preserved. His hair was still dark, still slightly unruly, though cut shorter. The very set of his posture screamed control, authority, distance.
He turned.
Time did not collapse. It did not fold her back into a tear-stained girl in a wedding dress. It simply presented the facts. His face was more angular, the lines of it carved by the intervening years into something more severe, more formidable. He looked older. Tired, in a deep-set way that had nothing to do with a single sleepless night. And his eyes… his light hazel eyes, flecked with that same gold, were not warm. They were not cold. They were utterly neutral. The eyes of a clinician assessing a new intake.
"Dr. Snow," he said. He did not say her name. He stated her title, her surname. It was a wall, ten feet high and made of polished steel.
"Dr. Rowon," she replied, her own voice thankfully steady, matching his professional tone. She stepped fully into the room, closing the door behind her.
"Sit." He gestured to the chair in front of his desk and moved to take his own seat. The movement was economical, effortless. He opened the file before him—her file, she realized. Her credentials, her case assignments.
The silence stretched as he read. It was a power play, a deliberate establishment of hierarchy. She sat, back straight, hands folded in her lap, waiting. A thousand questions scrambled at the base of her throat, desperate and foolish.
How is your mother? Is she proud? Did she miss me? Did you ever look at the empty house and wonder? Have you been happy?
But she looked at him—at Dr. Rowon, not Aris—and she knew. Any such question would be met with a clinical stare. An arched eyebrow. Perhaps a dry, cutting remark about the irrelevance of personal history to professional practice. He would see it as a weakness, a failure of boundaries. An insult to the ordered present he had built.
He finally looked up, his gaze pinning her. "Your preliminary assessments on the Davis and Cho cases are adequate. Your differentials lack depth. You rely too heavily on patient self-report without sufficient challenge to cognitive distortions. This is a common early-career error."
His voice was a lecture. A correction. It was exactly as Dr. Vance had said: a scalpel.
"I understand," Amaya said, forcing herself to meet his gaze. "I will adjust my approach."
"See that you do." He made a note in the margin of her paper with his precise pen. "You will submit revised treatment plans by Thursday. We will review them in our next meeting. You are also to observe my cognitive behavioral therapy session with a refractory OCD patient tomorrow at eleven. Take detailed notes on the Socratic questioning technique. Your current methodology is insufficiently rigorous."
"Yes, Dr. Rowon."
He closed the file, the gesture final. The meeting was clearly over. He had dissected her professional performance in three minutes and found it lacking. There was to be no acknowledgment of the past, no flicker of the person she used to be to him.
She stood, feeling unsteady despite her resolve. This was it. This was her life now. He was a superior, a critic, a stone in her path. The boy who had given her a silver swan was gone, if he had ever existed at all.
But as she turned to leave, her eyes caught something on the corner of his immaculate desk, partly obscured by the monitor.
It was a small, framed photograph, facing away from her. But from the angle, she could just see the edge of it—the faded pattern of a familiar kitchen tile, a splash of vibrant color that could only be a cashmere blanket in emerald green. Elara's blanket.
Her breath hitched, a tiny, traitorous sound in the quiet room.
His head snapped up, his gaze sharpening, following her line of sight to the photo. For a fraction of a second, the perfectly composed mask slipped. Something raw and complicated flashed in his eyes—not warmth, but a kind of fierce, guarded protectiveness. It was gone so fast she might have imagined it, replaced by a frostier version of his professional chill.
"Is there something else, Dr. Snow?" The question was a clear warning. A command to leave.
The questions she had swallowed rose again, sharp and painful. How is she? Does she ever ask about me? Did you tell her I disappeared?
But looking at his closed face, the unyielding set of his jaw, she knew any mention of Elara, any reach across the chasm of the past, would be a catastrophic mistake. He would view it as the ultimate unprofessionalism. A pathetic attempt to conjure ghosts.
"No," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. She cleared her throat. "No, Dr. Rowon. That's all."
She walked out of his office, the door clicking shut with a sound of absolute finality behind her. She made it three steps down the hallway before she had to stop, leaning a hand against the cool, institutional wall.
She had wanted a sign, a crack, a hint that the past five years had held a single thought of her. She had gotten one—a glimpse of a photo that proved he remembered, that his mother was still part of his life. But the price of that knowledge was the confirmation of a colder truth: the past was a locked room. And Dr. Aris Rowon had thrown away the key.