Page 66 of Obeying

KRISTEN

Logan's apartment is nothing like the cabin. It’s clean, modern, and minimal. Everything in its place. A bookshelf organized by subject, a kitchen where I'm fairly certain the spices are alphabetized, a dining table that's currently buried under every piece of evidence I've collected over the years with Miguel Cruz.

This is the first time I've been here. He offered to do this at the hospital, but I said no. Too many eyes. Too many people who'd see us together and add it to the rumor pile. So he suggested his place, and I said yes, and now I'm sitting at his dining table, drinking coffee from a mug that matches all the others in his cabinet because of course it does.

"Your apartment looks like a showroom," I say, looking around.

"It's just clean."

"It's clinical. There's nothing on the walls."

"There's a clock."

"A clock doesn't count."

"It tells time. That's functional."

"Logan, you need at least one thing in this apartment that isn't just for functionality."

"You're here. That's not functional at all."

I stare at him. He adjusts his glasses and takes a sip of his coffee without changing his expression, and I can't tell if he just insulted me or complimented me, and that's so perfectly Logan that I don't even bother asking.

We've been at this for four hours.

I'm sitting across from him with a legal pad, a laptop, and a stack of bank statements I printed earlier. He's got a whiteboard he pulled out of his office. I don't even want to ask why he has one in his apartment. It's now propped against the wall with a timeline drawn across it in his strangely neat handwriting. Dates on the left. Incidents on the right. Lines connecting them.

"Okay," he says. "November 14. Walk me through it."

I look at the bank statement in my hand. "He canceled my credit cards. Both of them. I found out at a pharmacy when I tried to buy cold medicine and the card was declined."

"Why did he cancel them?"

"Because I went to dinner with a group from the hospital without telling him first. When I got home, he said if I couldn't be trusted to communicate my plans, he couldn't trust me with shared finances." I put the statement down. "He reopened them two days later. After I apologized."

Logan writes it on the whiteboard. Date. Incident. Consequence. He doesn't react. Just documents it the same way he'd document a patient's symptoms. Methodical and precise.

"Next one," he says.

"January sixth." I flip to the next page. "I had lunch with a male colleague. Aaron Holland, another resident. It was in the cafeteria, broad daylight, other people at the table. Miguel found out and told me I couldn't see Aaron anymore. He said people would talk. That it looked inappropriate. That he was protecting my reputation."

"Was it inappropriate?"

"Aaron is gay. Miguel knew that, but it didn't matter."

Logan writes it down. "Next."

We go through six more. Each one precise, each one documented. The time he showed up at the hospital unannounced to “surprise me” and then spent twenty minutes questioning the nurses about who I'd been talking to. The time he went through my phone while I was sleeping and deleted numbers he didn't recognize. The time he told me my best friend from med school was 'toxic' and slowly made me stop calling her until we lost touch entirely.

I stop writing. My hand hurts from gripping the pen, and my eyes are burning.

"You okay?" Logan asks.

"Yeah. I just need a second." I put the pen down and flex my fingers. "It's strange. Living through it felt like drowning. Slow, constant, you don't notice how deep you are until you can't breathe. But writing it down like this, seeing the dates, the gaps between incidents getting shorter, it's like looking at an X-ray of something you already knew was broken."

He's quiet for a moment. "Do you want to stop?"

"No." I pick up the pen. "What's next?"