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Sent January 23. Delivered to Maren. Complete.

I open it.

It says what it should say. More usable range through the right shoulder. Compensation reduced. Ongoing management belongs with team medical staff.

Near the bottom is the answer I asked him for on Friday afternoon.

Patient denies numbness or tingling in either hand.

He looked directly at me and said no. I watched his face for one beat longer than the question needed, and then I recorded the answer he gave me, and the line is now in a document that has left my control entirely.

There is nothing unfinished between this clinic and Colt Riley.

I close the record and sign out.

The cart is parked beside the door and I move it to reach my coat, and the repaired wheel crosses the threshold in a straight line, quiet and effortless, exactly as it will go on doing for whoever works in this room next.

Colt would come if I called him.

The certainty arrives before I can argue with it. He would leave whatever room he is standing in. He would carry the folder, find the lawyer, call somebody with an office, make space in his house, and begin solving it before I had worked out which part of it I could bear to hand over.

He would also be unbearable about it.

I take out my phone. His thread is still near the top of it, eleven weeks of appointment changes and exercise questions and two-word answers, and nothing in it belongs to whatever Friday was.

My thumb rests near the call symbol.

I do not press it.

I read the last ordinary message instead, and then I lock the screen and put the phone in my coat pocket and pick up the blue folder.

On Friday he asked to see me away from here.

This morning, away from here has become considerably larger.

Chapter sixteen

Astrid

Two weeks after the clinic removes my name from its schedule, I move money out of the account labeled HOUSE.

The transfer screen asks whether I am certain.

The question is decorative. The lawyer requires a retainer before the appointment and Tova’s counselor requires payment before the session, and neither of them accepts a floor plan with a green desk drawn under a window.

I enter the amount. The balance changes immediately, and I look at it long enough to know the number without having wanted to.

Across the table Tova pushes cereal around a bowl and pretends she is not watching me do it.

The counselor’s invoice is beside my laptop. PRIVATE PAY is printed across the top in capital letters, as though privacy were a luxury category rather than the absence of insurance.

“Is that for today?”

“Yes.”

“Because the insurance stopped?”

I close the banking window. “Because I do not want you waiting while I replace it.”