She had eaten standing at the counter, because sitting down would have meant choosing between the small table by the window and the couch, and a choice that small was not safe to make tonight.
The September issue lay between the kettle and the sink, where she had set it on coming in. It was hers; she had three more copies in the office, and a PDF on her laptop, and another in her email she had never read because she did not need to read her own work. The hard copy was here. The hard copy was the version that lacked the paragraph about Daniel.
On the back of a takeout receipt she made a list.
Editor with access to the unedited file: Ruth Khoury.
Reviewers: two. One she could name — a man at Hopkins whose feedback had been thorough and impersonal, and whose margin notes suggested someone who would not have read past the first reference to a sibling, let alone shared the section out. The other had reviewed blind. She had not asked. In the months since publication she had not thought to ask.
Stolen file, she wrote, and crossed it out. Intercepted at typesetting — crossed out. Shared in confidence stayed on the page, because she doubted it yet left it there, unwilling to remove a possibility because it discomforted her.
Down the hallway, her bedroom door was closed. She had pulled it shut in the morning before leaving for the office. On any other day of the year the door of a room she lived alone in stayed open, and tonight it remained closed.
Wine went into a glass. It stayed where she put it. A second glass followed, then the bottle was capped, and the two glasses lined up on the counter like exhibits.
The name of the blind reviewer would be in her sent folder. It would be in her contract with the journal. Both required her to open her laptop.
Her laptop stayed shut.
In the morning she asked Josh to run a background check on Mr. Carrow.
"Standard?"
"Standard."
He noted it on the corner of his desk pad with the small administrative neutrality that allowed him to keep the day moving. Josh asked nothing about why she had ordered no such thing on any previous patient. He copied the request as written.
The phrase had taken up residence in his vocabulary now, and in hers. As written. She went back to her office and closed the door behind her and the closing of it sounded louder than the room required.
She rang the Journal of Palliative Psychiatry from the desk phone. The voice that answered belonged to a woman named Helena, who had been at the editorial desk longer than Ruth Khoury had been editor, and who treated phone calls as librarians treat noise.
"Doctor Khoury is in Geneva until Thursday. May I take a message?"
"I'd like to ask her about draft materials. The September issue."
"Anything I can pass to her?"
"My name. Doctor Collins. Noelle Collins. She'll know the article."
There was a small silence on the other end that might have been the silence of someone writing a name down, or the silence of someone who had heard the name recently and was deciding whether to mention it.
"Thursday."
"Thursday is fine."
The line clicked. She set the phone down. She had avoided the words leak and breach. She had asked, with the careful indirection professionals used to ask each other things they would be embarrassed about later, whether anyone besides Khoury had touched the file. The asking would be on Khoury's desk by Thursday, in some form, in Geneva, and the form of it would depend on what Helena had decided about that pause.
Lena's office was across the river, on a corridor where the carpet had been chosen by a committee. Plants Lena watered. A window onto a courtyard with a single sycamore. A teal scarf wrapped twice around her shoulders, because Lena did not believe in offices being gray.
"You look tired."
"I'm sleeping fine."
"That isn't what I said."
Noelle sat in the chair she always sat in. Lena remained standing; she was finishing a stack of forms, signing them with the slow looping initials that took her longer than anyone else's because she had learned to sign before computers and would not give it up.
"Caseload?"
"Manageable."
"New intakes?"
"One."
Lena finished the last form. She came around the desk, and instead of going back to her own chair sat in the chair beside Noelle's — the chair patients sat in when patients came to her, and which, between them, was the chair Lena used when she wanted to listen.
"Tell me about the one."
"Anonymous. Routine."
The three words came out in the order they had been waiting in all morning. Between them, on the carpet, they sat like a card slid across a table face-down.
Lena kept the silence. She let it sit there long enough that one of them would have had to pick it up. Noelle left it where it was. She had her own version of the instrument and could match it, because Lena had taught it to her in the first place.
"Treatment-resistant?"
"Yes."
"How long has he been in treatment?"
"A while."
"How was the first session?"
A pause was a piece of furniture. You could move it. You could leave it. Noelle left it.
"Educational."
Lena's mouth did the thing that was nearly a smile and was not a smile. Her hand went to the edge of the scarf, settling it without needing to, as she did when she was reaching for a question and choosing not to ask it. Noelle's gaze caught on the small movement and lifted away.
Lena rose. The desk did not draw her back; she walked to the window and adjusted the slats on the blind so the light came in flatter — small housekeeping she performed when she was deciding whether to push.
She let it pass.
"I'm going to ask you one question, and you're going to answer it the way friends answer questions, not the way supervisees answer questions. Are you sleeping?"
"Mostly."
"Mostly."
"Yes."
"Then I'll see you Thursday." Lena turned from the window. "Bring something to drink that isn't coffee."
"I drink water."
"Bring something you want."
The supervision had lasted twelve minutes. They were scheduled for forty.
In the hall outside, Noelle stood for a moment with her hand on the wall. The wall was cool. The small grain of the paint pressed back against her palm, even and dry. Lena had given her the exit, and she had taken it, and they both knew, and neither of them had named it.
Back Bay swallowed the rest of the morning. She saw two patients in the afternoon — both established, both for whom she had the muscle memory and the language ready — and at six o'clock, when Josh had gone home and the building had emptied into the quiet old buildings settled into once their boilers cycled down, she opened the Carrow folder.
The intake form. James Carrow. DOB 1687.
In the morning her glance had skirted the date. She had looked at it through the corner of her eye, as one keeps glancing back at a child's drawing on the refrigerator while making dinner. Now she set the folder square to the edge of the blotter and let her gaze sit on the four numerals.
Probably 1987.
She thought it again, the second time as if saying it aloud would make it true.
The numerals held.
She had brought her pen up to write something — a note to herself for the next session, a question to ask, the kind of working hypothesis she had built her career on putting onto paper at the end of every day. The pen hovered over the page. She put it down without writing.
She closed the folder. The folder stayed where it lay.
For a moment she only sat with it: the soft beige cardstock, the label printed in the careful sans-serif Josh used for every patient, the small dog-ear at one corner she had not noticed until now. Outside the window a car passed and was gone. The radiator ticked twice and stopped.
Her coat came off the hook. Her bag came up off the floor. At the door she stopped with her hand on the switch.
The blotter held the folder in its center. The chair opposite her own held the cooling outline of nobody. In seven years in this office she had never left a patient file on the desk overnight.
She turned off the lights.