Clara Shaw woke at 4:17 a.m., as if an invisible hand had reached into her chest and yanked her out of sleep.
For a second, she didn't remember where she was.
Her heart kicked hard against her ribs, ready for the sound of footsteps in the hallway, for the creak of the bedroom door, for Daniel's voice in the dark: *"Why are you still in bed? It's not like you have anything important to do."*
No footsteps came.
No door opened.
The silence pressed in around her, heavy and unfamiliar.
She lay there, staring at the faint cracks in the ceiling of the small rented apartment, listening. A fridge humming, a pipe knocking somewhere in the wall, muffled music from another floor. Someone coughed in a neighboring unit, then flushed a toilet. The world went on, indifferent.
No Daniel.
The realization came slowly, like light pushing its way under a closed door.
He was gone.
Dead on the kitchen floor. Blood on the tiles. His head at that wrong angle. His hand still around the stem of a glass he hadn't been allowed to finish.
She had done that.
The thought didn't jolt her anymore. It moved through her like a bruise she'd had time to prod. Familiar, tender, still alive under the skin.
Clara swung her legs over the bed and sat up. The room was too cold; the old heater rattled like an asthmatic smoker and managed to warm nothing. She rubbed her arms, then pushed herself to her feet and walked to the bathroom.
The mirror light flickered twice before it steadied. She leaned toward it.
Her face looked older in this place. Not in years, exactly, but in miles. Dark crescents sat under her eyes, the kind that didn't vanish with sleep. Her skin was pale, a little sallow. Her mouth, relaxed, looked neither kind nor cruel—just tired.
Daniel had hated when she looked tired.
"You look like hell, Clara," he'd say, brushing past her on his way out of the bedroom. "People will think I'm not taking care of you."
As if exhaustion were an insult to him.
She turned on the tap and splashed cold water on her face. It shocked her fully awake. Droplets clung to her lashes and dripped from her chin into the chipped sink.
From next door came the sound of raised voices. A man, low and sharp. A woman, thinner, pleading or angry—it was hard to tell through the wall. Clara paused, toothbrush in hand, listening.
"… told you already—"
"… always like this—"
A thud. Something slammed. Not a body. A cupboard, maybe. A door.
She waited for the sick slide in her stomach, the automatic flinch. It came, but dulled, like an echo of an echo. She rinsed her mouth and turned away from the mirror.
"Not my problem," she murmured. Saying it out loud felt both powerful and false.
She made coffee in the little kitchen. The machine groaned like it resented being used. The mug she used had a chip on the rim; she turned it to the other side, out of habit more than concern. Cheap instant coffee, too much bitterness, not enough sugar. She drank it anyway.
The apartment was small: one bedroom, a narrow strip of kitchen, a bathroom, a living space that could hold a table, two chairs, and the illusion of a couch if she squinted. The landlord had called it "cozy" on the listing. It was what people like Daniel would have called "tragic."
To Clara, it was unfamiliar.
Not safe. Not yet.
But at least no one else owned the air here.
She sat at the wobbly table near the window and watched the street below. Early workers moved with hunched shoulders and hot drinks clutched like lifelines. Delivery trucks idled at the curb. A dog tugged its owner down the sidewalk, eager, unaware of concepts like debt, guilt, or self-defense.
Clara wrapped both hands around the mug, letting the heat seep into her fingers. Her wrist twinged—the one Daniel had broken. It always ached in the cold.
He'd grabbed her so hard she'd heard the crack before she'd felt the pain.
"You're so fragile," he had said afterward, almost amused. "You break so easily."
She'd worn a brace for weeks, long sleeves in hot weather, a smile at his office parties.
"Kitchen fall," Daniel had told people. "You know how clumsy she is."
They had nodded sympathetically.
No one had asked her what happened.
Clara stared at the street longer than she meant to. Her thoughts kept sliding sideways, away from traffic and toward yesterday's session.
Elias Kane.
Most of the men she'd met in rooms like that blurred together. They had the same soft, practiced tone, the same "I'm listening" expression, the same readiness to tell her how she felt in clinical words. They wanted her to cry. They wanted a narrative arc. They wanted something they could put into a neat report, one that made everyone feel better about the outcome.
Elias was different.
He didn't clutter the room with empathy. He didn't try to fill the silences. When she'd looked at him, she hadn't seen kindness.
She'd seen discipline.
He sat like a man who had spent his life in control of every tiny movement. Back straight. Shoulders relaxed but not slumped. Hands still. Eyes steady. His voice had no unnecessary softness, no syrup poured over hard questions.
He should have been easy to manipulate. Men who thought they were in control often were.
But when she'd talked about Daniel—about the gaslighting, the isolation, the first hit—Elias hadn't given her what other people gave her. There had been no immediate anger on her behalf. No outrage. No murmured, "You didn't deserve that."
He had just listened. Written. Watched.
When she told him she felt relief after Daniel died, he had not flinched. Not visibly. But his pen had paused. His gaze had sharpened, the tiniest shift.
That was when she'd known she had his attention.
Not the attention of a doctor concerned for a patient.
The attention of a man standing near a cliff, aware of the drop for the first time.
Clara finished her coffee, rinsed the mug, and set it upside down to dry. Habit. Routine. She needed those now, or the days would dissolve into one long, shapeless wait for the trial.
She was out on bail under conditions: report to her lawyer, stay reachable, no contact with Daniel's family, no leaving the city. She moved like someone on a leash that wasn't visible but was always present.
On the small table by the door sat a folded newspaper from two days ago. She hadn't thrown it out. The front page carried a small article, below the fold:
ARCHITECT DANIEL SHAW KILLED IN DOMESTIC INCIDENT
Wife Claims Self-Defense
There was a photo of Daniel, smiling in a tailored suit, arms crossed in front of one of his developments. The article called him "brilliant," "visionary," "beloved." It called her "estranged," "troubled," "unbalanced," depending on which sentence she looked at.
She had read it once. Then again. Then again, slower.
They always did that—cleaned up the dead, polished them, made them easier to mourn.
Monsters looked better in eulogies than they did in hospital lighting.
Clara picked up the paper, stared at his face for a moment, then folded it again and shoved it back under the pile of mail. Not gone. Just buried. Like so many other things.
She checked the time. Too early for a call from her lawyer. Too late to pretend she could fall back asleep.
Her next session with Elias wasn't until tomorrow, but he was already moving through the hours with her. Not as a comforting presence. More like a splinter she couldn't quite dig out.
She thought of the way he'd asked, *"Did you want to be caught?"*
That had been the only question that almost hurt.
Because the answer was complicated.
Had she wanted to be caught? No. Yes. Maybe.
She hadn't run. She hadn't tried to hide the body, clean the scene, invent an intruder. The knife had been in her hand. The blood had been on her clothes. She'd called 911 with her heart pounding, but not from fear of prison.
From the strange, dizzy freedom of realizing it was finally over.
She wanted the world to know what he had done.
But she also knew the world might not care.
Abusers didn't look like monsters when they donated to charity and designed children's hospitals. Victims didn't look like saints when they stayed, smiled in photographs, and said, "It's fine, really," when someone asked if they were okay.
People liked clean stories. Not this.
She reached for a notebook on the table. Spiral-bound, cheap. No one had told her to keep it. She wasn't one of those people who journaling had ever helped. But after she was charged, the public defender had said, "Write down what you remember. It might be useful."
She'd started, then kept going.
Now the pages held a messy mix of fact and thought. Dates. Scenes. What Daniel had said. What she had not said. Small observations about the way people looked at her now—like they were trying to decide which headline she deserved.
She flipped to a blank page and put down the date.
Then, without planning to, she wrote: *Elias Kane*.
For a moment she did nothing but look at the name.
What was he, exactly?
A doctor. An evaluator. A gatekeeper. A man whose words would carry weight in rooms where she wouldn't be allowed to speak freely. He could tilt the scale toward prison or toward something else.
But there was more.
Under the doctor, there was a man with a locked jaw and careful eyes, a man whose emotional life felt like a house where all the doors were shut. When she had looked at him and said, *"Everyone lies. The only difference is what they're trying to protect,"* something in his eyes had changed, just for a second.
Like she'd brushed against a door he kept bolted.
She began to write, the pen moving faster as the thoughts uncoupled from any intention to be "useful for court" and became something more like a strategy draft.
> He doesn't react like the others.
> He doesn't rush to pity.
> He listens for structure, not just story.
> That makes him dangerous.
> It also makes him predictable.
She paused, then crossed out the last word and wrote a different one above it.
*Interesting.*
She tapped the pen against the paper.
What did she want from him?
Not rescue. She wasn't naive enough to believe a man like Elias would sweep in and save her because he "understood" her. Men like him saved their reputations first, their careers second, and occasionally a patient if it didn't cost them too much.
She didn't want his guilt.
She wanted his attention.
Attention was power. Daniel had taught her that. He'd wielded his like a knife, giving and withdrawing it at will until she had bent herself into shapes she didn't recognize just to earn a little softness from him.
Now the imbalance pointed in another direction.
This time, she could be the one setting the terms.
If she let Elias see too much too quickly, he would retreat. Men like him didn't like recognizing themselves in other people's darkness. They couched it in academic language, locked it in files.
But if she gave him small, controlled doses—truths that unsettled him but didn't break him—he would keep coming back. Not because of duty.
Because of need.
She closed the notebook and stood.
The apartment felt smaller suddenly, the air thinner. She grabbed her coat and keys and stepped outside.
The hallway smelled of old paint and boiled vegetables. On the landing below, a woman in a bathrobe smoked by an open window, staring at nothing. She glanced at Clara, not with recognition, just the dull curiosity of someone who had too many of their own problems to store anyone else's.
Clara stepped past her, down the stairs, and out onto the street.
The air outside was cold and damp, the sky a flat sheet of cloud. Traffic hummed. A bus lumbered by, its windows fogged. She started walking with no clear destination, just the need to move.
Freedom on bail was a strange kind of leash. She could walk where she wanted, buy what she wanted with the little money she had, sit in any park, ride any bus. But every step carried the knowledge that nothing she built now would last. The trial waited like a wall at the end of a short road.
She wandered through streets she barely knew, past a grocery store, a laundromat, a closed bar with yesterday's specials still written on the board. At a crosswalk, a man in a suit jostled her shoulder and muttered, "Watch it," without looking up from his phone.
She almost laughed.
People brushed past her every day, completely unaware that she had killed someone with her own hands. That she had held a knife, watched blood, listened to the wet, awful sound of breathing stop.
If Daniel had been a stranger in a headline, they might have been impressed. Afraid. Disgusted. Curious.
But killers didn't wear labels in public.
They wore gray sweaters, cheap coats, and the same blank, tired expressions as everyone else.
She ended up in a small park wedged between two blocks of apartments. A few trees, bare branches scratching at the sky. A bench with peeling paint. A rusted playground where an exhausted father pushed a small child on a swing, his eyes glued to his phone.
Clara sat on the bench and watched the swings move.
She imagined the next session.
She saw herself walk into Elias's office, the way he would be sitting already, everything in place. The file on the desk. The notebook. The clock behind her, ticking loud enough to remind her the time wasn't really hers.
She rehearsed the first few minutes.
He would ask a neutral question, something like, *"How have you been since our last session?"* designed to sound open while actually funneling her into particular answers.
She could say, *"Fine."*
She could say, *"Thinking."*
She could say, *"Waiting."*
What she really wanted to say was, *"Did I get under your skin?"*
But that would be too much, too soon.
Better to let him ask.
Better to let him think he was the one steering this.
She thought of the way his eyes had sharpened when she said she felt relief. There had been a flicker of something there. Not judgment. Not horror.
Envy, maybe.
What would a man like Elias envy in her?
Not her past. Not the bruises. Not the years.
Maybe the fact that she had crossed a line he had only ever looked at.
Maybe the fact that she had done the thing most people spent their whole lives fantasizing about in the dark when they were angry and powerless: she had taken back control in the most final, unforgivable way.
She didn't believe in noble motives—not anymore.
People liked stories where victims became survivors and moved on, clean and healed. They didn't like stories where victims became something else—something that didn't fit on a talk show couch.
Clara dug her fingers into the edge of the bench, feeling the old paint flake under her nails.
She didn't know yet what Elias wanted.
But she knew this: the moment his desire—whatever shape it took—became clearer than his professionalism, he would be hers to play with.
The thought should have repulsed her.
Instead, it warmed her in a way the weak sun couldn't.
The child on the swing laughed, a high, bright noise that didn't belong in her head. She stood abruptly and started walking back toward her apartment, the sound fading behind her.
On the way, she passed a newsstand. Her face wasn't on any covers yet, but Daniel's appeared again, smaller this time, linked to some profile about his "architectural legacy." She kept walking.
Back in the apartment, the silence greeted her like a familiar stranger.
She took off her coat, sat at the table again, and opened the notebook to the page where she had written Elias's name.
Under what she had already written, she added:
> He thinks he's here to assess me.
> He doesn't realize I'm assessing him too.
>
> The difference is, I have nothing left to lose.
She capped the pen and closed the notebook.
Tomorrow, she would sit across from him again. She would watch his eyes, his hands, the way his jaw tensed when a question mattered more than he wanted it to. She would answer in half-truths and sharp edges, enough to make him lean closer without realizing he was doing it.
Because she knew, deep down, that this wasn't just therapy.
It was an invitation.
And she had every intention of seeing how far he was willing to go once he stepped through the door.