The first night, I didn't sleep at all. Or rather, I couldn't sleep.
I lay in the pristine white bed, staring at the ceiling, watching shadows from the fjord's reflected moonlight ripple across the concrete like liquid silver. The silence had texture. Not the absence of sound but something denser — the fjord's kind of quiet, which pressed rather than receded, as though the water below had swallowed everything that had ever tried to escape it.
I was aware of everything. The exact temperature of the linen against my arms. The particular quality of my own breathing. The way the silence had a direction — it pressed from the window side, from the water.
I kept returning to the handshake. His thumb against the inside of my wrist — the inside, not the back — and the pause before he released me that was approximately one second longer than professional courtesy required.
I had timed it. That was the problem.
A CBT therapist does not time handshakes.
Clause 7.3: The Praxist maintains clinical objectivity. Emotional attachment is prohibited.
I'd asked him what would happen if that rule was broken. He'd said the contract would be terminated immediately.
Everything he'd built would be evidence of nothing.
But he'd also shown me, for a fraction of a second, that he knew the danger was real. Not as a theoretical risk. As a specific one.
I filed that too.
I turned onto my side, pulling the covers higher, and my gaze landed on the black binder sitting on the desk. SESSION GUIDELINES. I'd skimmed it earlier — seventy pages of detailed protocols, safety procedures, and technique descriptions. But even through the dry, academic language, I could feel the weight of what I'd agreed to.
Session structures may include physical restraint, sensory deprivation, controlled discomfort, and psychological boundary testing. Clients will be guided to their Edge repeatedly. Resistance is expected and will be documented.
My Edge.
I had spent as long as I could remember making sure no one found it.
I threw off the covers and stood.
At 3 AM, I made the bed. Tightened the corners. Smoothed the surface until it held no evidence of a person having lain there.
Then I stood back and looked at what my hands had done.
I could not explain it.
I went to the window instead.
The fjord below was absolutely still. Mountains on the far side had lost their peaks to cloud. The whole landscape had the quality of something that had been here before humans arrived and was simply waiting for them to finish.
I pressed my palm against the glass. Cold. Solid. Real.
Forty-seven pages. My signature at the bottom.
Two hundred thousand dollars. Twelve weeks. A contract that stripped away every defence I'd spent my adult life building.
I had been so certain it was the right thing.
I was still certain. That was almost worse.
I opened the Session Guidelines binder, flipping past the safety protocols to the section labeled "Therapeutic Objectives."
The Praxis methodology operates on the principle that true self-actualization requires dismantling maladaptive control structures. Clients often develop hypervigilance and rigidity as protective mechanisms against past trauma or perceived threats. These mechanisms, while initially adaptive, eventually become prisons.
Through structured surrender experiences, clients learn to differentiate between healthy agency and compulsive control. The goal is not to eliminate autonomy, but to expand it — to give clients the choice to surrender when surrender serves them.
I closed the binder.
He'd read my Client Dossier. Eight years of case notes, intake assessments, the psychological history I'd submitted as part of the application. He knew the shape of what I was before I'd said a word.
I turned away from the window and picked up the card from the desk. His handwriting was compressed, slightly backward-leaning — the hand of someone who had learned to write somewhere other than here and never quite unlearned it.
I had not expected that.
The first rule of Praxis: You will learn that control is not power. Power is the choice to surrender it.
He was right. I had known he was right before I read the card the first time.
That was the part I couldn't file away.
I traced the letters.
I stopped when I noticed I was doing it.
By the time thin morning light began filtering through the window, I'd given up on sleep entirely. I showered, dressed in the simple clothes I'd packed — black leggings, an oversized sweater — and stood in the middle of my suite.
I did not know what to do with my hands.
The Protocol had been clear: Clients will have access to common areas during Integration Periods, but movements are restricted to the East Wing unless accompanied by staff.
Integration Period. The forty-eight hours between sessions, during which I was supposed to process, rest, and prepare for the next psychological excavation.
Forty-eight hours felt like an eternity.
I opened my door carefully, half-expecting an alarm or Vigdis to materialize out of thin air. Neither happened. The corridor was empty, silent, and just as austere as I remembered. Polished concrete, white walls, lighting recessed so deeply into the ceiling that it cast no shadows. Everything was visible. Nothing was warm.
I turned right, following the hallway's gentle curve. The East Wing, according to the map in my welcome packet, housed six client suites, a small library, a meditation room, and a communal dining area. Six suites. I had not heard a single sound from any of them.
The library came first. Floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, built-in shelves on the other. The collection was curated—psychology texts, philosophy, and some fiction.
I ran my fingers along the spines. Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Fromm's The Art of Loving. Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus.
A curated argument. Every book was a thesis statement about what was about to happen to me.
I pulled out the Nin and put it back.
A small table near the window held a carafe of coffee and a single white cup. I poured myself some and settled into one of the leather chairs, staring out at the water.
The coffee was excellent. Dark, strong, perfectly brewed. Everything here was perfect. Controlled. Intentional.
I wondered if Meric had designed the space himself, or if the Institute's aesthetic was something he'd inherited. The welcome packet had mentioned the Institute was fifteen years old, but it didn't say who'd founded it or why. Just that it was "the premiere facility for behavioral psychology and therapeutic power exchange."
Therapeutic power exchange.
I read it twice.
I set down the coffee cup to pull out my phone before remembering—
Right. No phone.
I'd surrendered it to Vigdis yesterday. Clause 4.2. No contact with the outside world for twelve weeks. No emails, no texts, no distractions from my patients or colleagues or the life in Boston that ran perfectly well without me having to feel any of it.
The absence had a shape. I kept reaching for it — pocket, then bag, then the surface of the table — before I remembered.
Three times in ten minutes.
I noted that.
I left the library. I needed to move, to see more of this place that would be my entire world for the next three months.
The meditation room was next—a small, circular space with cushions on the floor and a wall of textured stone that looked like it had been carved from the cliff itself. Peaceful. Empty. I didn't go in.
The dining area was larger, with several small tables and a serving station that was currently empty. Meals delivered at seven, noon, and six, Vigdis had said. It was barely past six now.
I kept walking.
The corridor curved again, and I found myself facing a set of glass doors marked OBSERVATION WING - AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY.
I stopped.
Yesterday, Vigdis had led me through these doors from the other side—escorted, permitted. But now, standing here alone on the client side of the boundary, the restriction felt absolute.
This was the edge of my permitted space.
Through the frosted glass, I could make out the corridor beyond—the one that housed administrative offices, security operations, and the Praxists' private suites.
Meric's suite was somewhere beyond those doors.
I pressed my fingertips against the frosted glass — just for a moment, just to feel the cold of it — and then pulled my hand back.
I was a case study. A psychological puzzle.
The fact that my pulse had changed when I touched the glass was data.
Nothing more.
I turned away.
Behind me, the corridor was empty. In front of me, it curved back toward my suite, toward the white bed I had already made twice, toward twenty-six hours of waiting.
Session One.
I walked.