Julian called three times that Tuesday morning.
Matthew only answered the last call.
“Are you up?” Julian asked.
“I’m on my way.”
“You’re still in bed. I can hear the sheets.”
“I’m on my way out of bed,” Matthew said, and hung up.
He never went to bed until it was nearly light, so a morning appointment was the middle of the night for him.
He got up anyway.
His father had made it very clear that the Glasshouse depended on these twelve sessions with Dr.
Constance Pike, a therapist who would expect him to talk about himself for an hour every Tuesday.
Later on Julian sent a message as well, asking whether he’d arrived.
Matthew replied with a photograph of Dr.
Pike’s front door, on a narrow street downtown, then went up to her office on the second floor.
It was a small, warm room with two armchairs facing each other and very little else.
Dr.
Pike was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses, and she was already knitting when he came in.
She simply nodded at the empty armchair in front of her and continued knitting.
Since his father had chosen her, Matthew had expected someone stern, perhaps slightly arrogant too, ready to lecture him about life.
Instead, she seemed perfectly satisfied to wait for him to get comfortable.
He sat down with a smile and started talking, as he usually did with people who were paid to put up with him.
It was easier to choose the subject himself than to wait for a question he might not want to answer.
He told her it was a lovely room, then asked what she was knitting.
“A scarf,” she said.
“I could use one,” Matthew said.
“A reindeer ate mine the other day.”
Anyone else would have asked about the reindeer, but Dr.
Pike simply went on knitting.
“Your father pays for twelve sessions,” she said.
“He’ll be told whether you came, but everything else stays in this room.”
Matthew had no plans to talk about anything too personal anyway, but in a way, what she said reassured him.
“I should warn you that I’m a hopeless case,” he said.
“You won’t get anywhere with me.”
“I’ll try not to take it personally.”
At first, there was just a big, empty silence between them.
Dr.
Pike seemed perfectly comfortable with it, but eventually it became too heavy for Matthew, and he ended up talking about whatever nonsense came to mind.
People usually laughed at him or disapproved of him, and he had his own protocol for both situations.
But Dr.
Pike somehow fell into a third category Matthew wasn’t too accustomed to.
Whatever he said, she just kept on knitting at a steady pace.
He wasn’t used to being so easy to ignore, so he decided that by the twelfth session, he would make her stop knitting at least once.
“Tell me about your week,” she eventually asked when Matthew ran out of things to say.
“I recently met a woman who hates me.”
“And?”
“Then I met another one.”
“In the same week?”
“The very next night, actually.”
He smiled at his own account of things, since now that he was saying it out loud, he could imagine how it must sound to her.
“Do they know about each other?”
“I hope not,” Matthew said.
“I should probably mention that one of them bites too.”
“Start with the first one,” she said.
Matthew chose his words carefully, since he could hardly tell his therapist that he had met the first one while they were both robbing someone’s house.
“We were at the same party,” he said.
“And due to recent circumstances, we both wanted the same thing.”
“What thing?”
“Something we both fancied, it doesn’t really matter.” It was as close to the truth as he could come without confessing to a burglary.
“She got it first.”
“And you?”
“I got this.”
He pushed back his cuff to show her his wrist.
The bite had faded to a yellow bruise by now, but the marks of her teeth were still easy to see.
He was sure that this, at least, would make Dr.
Pike stop knitting.
She looked at his wrist over the top of her glasses, but her needles never stopped moving.
“Did you try to stop her?” she asked.
“I did. Very politely, I might add.”
That was the truth.
He had even apologized to her at one point, which she hadn’t seemed to appreciate.
“Most people would stay away from a woman who bit them,” Dr.
Pike said.
“So why is she still on your mind?”
The honest answer was the knot.
He couldn’t tell Dr.
Pike about it without also telling her the rest of it, so he looked for a way around it.
“She reminded me of someone,” he said.
“Who?”
“Someone who was kind to me once.” He said it lightly and smiled.
“It doesn’t happen to me very often, so I tend to remember it when it does.”
Then he stopped talking, uneasy at how much he had said.
He hadn’t wanted to talk about Sabine, especially to someone he had only just met.
Dr.
Pike let that sit for a long while.
Matthew found the silence harder to bear than any question she could have asked, since he couldn’t think of anything to say.
“We’ll come back to that,” she said eventually.
He hoped she would forget.
To change the subject, he asked how long the scarf was going to be.
“Long,” Dr.
Pike replied.
“Some of my clients take a while. And the second one?”
“She works night shifts at the hotel.”
“Is this where the reindeer comes in?”
Matthew stared at her.
He had mentioned the reindeer right at the beginning, only as a joke, and she hadn’t even looked up from her knitting earlier.
Apparently she had paid more attention than he thought.
So he told her, as briefly as he could, about the bedtime story he had asked for and the hotel history Miss Ellis had read him instead.
Then he told her about the reindeer.
He left out her name, though, since it seemed unfair to talk about her to a stranger.
“Why a reindeer?” Dr.
Pike asked.
“Because she says ‘certainly, sir’ to everything,” Matthew said.
“And I wanted to see what she was like when she couldn’t.”
Matthew surprised himself with that admission.
Everyone at the Voss was polite to him, but Miss Ellis seemed to use her politeness to keep him at a distance.
He wanted to know what she was like when she couldn’t do that anymore, even if her opinion of him turned out to be just as bad as he suspected.
“Do you think she hates you?”
“She calls me sir.”
“Is that worse?”
“Much worse.”
Matthew was surprised at how quickly the hour went by, since he had expected it to feel much longer.
There were only a few minutes left when Dr.
Pike asked her last question.
“Which one do you want to see again?”
Matthew opened his mouth to make a joke of it, as he used to do with pretty much everything.
Then he realized he couldn’t choose between them, and the joke simply didn’t come.
“…Both,” he said.
He had spent the whole week trying to figure out who the thief was, yet he was just as curious about Miss Ellis.
He hadn’t realized how much he wanted to see her again until Dr.
Pike had asked him to choose.
Now he found he didn’t want to give up the chance of seeing either of them, which surprised him more than it seemed to surprise Dr.
Pike.
That was when she finally broke the pattern and picked up the small notebook lying on the arm of her chair.
She wrote a single line in it without letting go of her knitting.
Matthew tried to read it upside down, but she closed the notebook too quickly for him to see.
“Same time next Tuesday, Matthew,” she said.
“Will you tell me what you wrote?”
“Not today.” She went back to her knitting as though he had already left.