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"Hey."

"Hey."

"Three days," I say.

He knows what I mean. Three days until Halloween. Three days until the holiday that rewired my nervous system twenty-one years ago and hasn't let go. Three days until every child on the block puts on a mask. My doorbell rings. The thing I can't name shows up in costume, asks for candy.

"How's your body?" he asks.

"The body is managing." The decorations. The fog machine. Ellis's skeleton. The daily negotiations with a neighborhood that has become a haunted house I live inside. "The brain is being a real dick about it."

"Tell me about the brain."

"The brain is counting the hours. Sixty-something hours until dark on the thirty-first. The brain knows that number and keeps updating it. Every hour the number gets smaller and the fear gets louder."

"What's the loudest part?"

"The door." My hand is on the phone. "Trick-or-treaters. The doorbell. Last year I turned off all the lights at 4:00 p.m. and sat in the dark with Bean until midnight. Didn't answer. Didn't open. Heard them in the hallway. The footsteps. The knocking. A kid yelled hello through the door, and I couldn't breathe for twenty seconds. A grown-ass man, hiding from a kid dressed as a dinosaur."

Silence for a moment.

"The door," he says. “Where does the fear come from, Milo?"

And here's the thing I've done exactly once with another human being, in a chair on a Thursday with Dr. Maren, after a year of Thursdays before I could get it out. I've kept it sealed since Maren left for Portland, waiting, apparently, for a voice on a phone at one in the morning.

"I was six," I say.

Bean's paw is warm against my shoulder.

"My brothers thought it would be funny. I was the youngest by a lot, the accident, the afterthought, and Halloween was the one night a year they all paid attention to me. They told me we were playing a game. They walked me down into the basement and they shut the door." My voice goes flat, the reciting voice, the only way the words come out at all. "Then they came at me in the dark. Skulls. Rubber spiders. One of them had a flashlight with a red filter taped over the lens, so the whole basement went an orangey-red color. That's where that comes from. A whole color off the menu for twenty-one years because of a flashlight."

"What did you do?"

"Screamed. For my parents. I could hear them upstairs, the TV, their voices." Here's the part that took Maren a year. The part I've said out loud exactly once. "They heard me. That's the thing I can't get past. They weren't gone and they weren't asleep. They heard every second of it, and they laughed. Through the door. Told me to man up. Told me it was just a joke, that I was being dramatic, that someday I'd thank my brothers for toughening me up."

"It sounds so fucking petty out loud. A kid got scared in a basement. People survive worse before breakfast." My throat is tight around the next part. "But I was six, and the people who were supposed to open the door were the ones holding it shut, and some wire crossed that night and never crossed back. The door opening means the thing is coming in. The door staying closed means I'm locked in with it. There's no version of the door that's safe. That's the loudest part. Not the kids. The door."

I stop. My heart is going. I've handed him the trauma, the sealed box, the entirety of it, and I don't regret it, which is its own kind of terrifying.

"Thank you for telling me that." A pause, before he clears his throat and continues. "They were supposed to open the door, Milo. The people on the other side of a door are supposed to open it."

Something cracks along a seam in my chest, and I breathe around it and say nothing, because there's nothing to say to a man who just put words to my feelings all these years.

"You don't have to answer the door, Milo."

"I know."

"What if the person at the door wasn't a stranger?"

The question shifts something in my chest. A tilt.

"What do you mean?"

"What if, on Halloween night, the knock came from someone you'd already decided was safe? Someone your body had already vetted. A face you'd already let in. One you'd know before the door finished opening."

Him, if that were even remotely possible… or… the man at the coffee shop. The hand on Bean's ears. The image arrives before I can stop it, before the rational part of my brain can point out that the man at the coffee shop doesn't know where I live, doesn't know about the phobia, doesn't know that a knock on my door on October 31 is not a knock, it's a detonation.

"My body doesn't work that way," I say. "The phobia doesn't have a bypass. It doesn't matter who's at the door. It matters that the door is opening on Halloween."