Page 3 of Girl, Accused

Evelyn thought about all the times she'd told her patients to trust their instincts. Two decades of nodding and scribbling notes while damaged souls poured their paranoid delusions into her lap.We all live in our heads, she'd say.Everything is filtered through our narratives. She'd built a career on dismantling other people's demons, but now her own scratched at the door of her thoughts.

She pushed them aside with thoughts of other people’s problems; Jim Sanders and his war wounds. Charlotte Weber and her designer depression. Their cries echoed in her head in a chorus of needs and wants and desperate please-fix-mes.

Then a knock at the door broke her train of thought.

Evelyn's pen slipped. Black ink bled across Mr. Caldwell's file. She stared at the spreading stain.

No one should be here. Especially not at this hour.

The knock came again. Soft, polite. The kind that saidI know you’re in there.

‘Maria?’ Evelyn called. The cleaning woman came early, around six or seven AM. Or at least Evelyn thought she did. She’d never actually seen the cleaner work her magic. All Evelyn knew was that the place smelled like lemon when she got here about nine.

The knock didn’t repeat. Maybe she’d imagined it. A product of too much self-reflection and hours spent marinating in other people’s problems. God knew she'd heard enough stories about things that went bump in the night. Footsteps that weren't there. Voices in empty rooms. The standard repertoire of minds cracking under pressure.

Evelyn rose out of her chair and edged towards the door. She peered out of the window and saw a few rows of trees that had been stripped bare by December, her Mercedes in the gravel lot with frost on its window. The angle was wrong for seeing the front door – something that seemed inconsequential when she’d given the building contractor her design specs.

Knock.

Her stomach dropped like she’d missed a step in the dark. Blood rushed to every corner of her body.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Who’s there?’

Silence responded. She tried to angle herself at the window to see any lingering shadows or silhouettes, but she couldn't catch anything.

You're being ridiculous, she told herself, but her body didn't believe the lie. She swept the office in search of anything that could double as a weapon. That crystal paperweight from Andrew might work, she thought. It was a heavy chunk of spite disguised as an anniversary gift. Evelyn grabbed it off her desk, moved toward the door, and assumed what might pass as an attack stance. She considered calling the police, but what could she say that wouldn't make her sound like a fool?Excuse me, but there’s a noise at my door but I can’t see anyone.

The operator would probably laugh on the inside, then say that without a clear threat, they couldn't send any units out. Sure. Then word would get around that Evelyn Summers was jumping at shadows. Andrew would hear about it, and he'd assume she was losing her mind without him. God, he'd love that.

No. This was Evelyn’s problem to solve.

She held her breath. Grabbed the doorknob. Tightened her grip on the paperweight. Prepared to feel like an idiot in the wake of a simple explanation.

Evelyn yanked the door handle. Cold air rushed in and stole her breath, but she found herself staring at nothing. No shadowy figure. No midnight prowler. Just a broken branch sprawled across her welcome mat, a stupid stick that the wind had turned into a phantom visitor.

‘Christ.’ The word escaped in a rush of relief mixed with self-directed anger. Evelyn kicked the branch aside. The movement sent more needles skittering across the walkway. Simple physics, nothing more. It was the kind of explanation she'd write in her notes while prescribing anxiety medication to some twitchy housewife.

Her hands trembled as she closed the door and set Andrew's paperweight back on the desk. Time to call it a night. Past time, really. These late hours played tricks on the mind. She knew this better than most, told her patients the same thing at least twice a week.

But knowledge didn't stop her pulse from racing. Didn't quiet the voice that whisperedwhat if. What if the branch wasn't just a branch? What if something had placed it there, waited for her to dismiss it?

The thought clung to her like a cobweb. She tried to brush it away with logic. Her property was meticulously landscaped, with the nearest trees standing nearly thirty yards from the entrance.

Stop it, she thought. This was how paranoia took root. The slow erosion of rational thought until you started thinking that celebrities were sending you secret messages.

Home time. Evelyn threw on her jacket, grabbed her bag – then froze.

Knock.

The sound shredded her illusion of control. Evelyn's heart forgot its rhythm, stumbled, then accelerated.

Not the wind this time. The knock carried intent.

Analyze this, commanded the part of her that still clung to credentials.Break it down. Catalogue the symptoms.But clinicaldistance crumbled beneath the weight of pure instinct. Her joints locked as decades of professional distance evaporated, caught between fight and flight and the terrible knowledge that both might be wrong.

‘Who's there?’ The question emerged as a stranger's voice. This wasn't the tone that had commanded respect in conference halls, that had reduced Andrew to stuttering rage during their final fights. This was prey-voice, victim-voice, the sound of someone discovering their place in the food chain.

Phone. Police. Take no chances.

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