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Dr. Evelyn Summers had long passed the age where she defined her self-worth by her career, but with the absence of much else in her life, she'd come back around to measuring her value in client hours and speaking fees. And that was how she justified being in the office at one AM on a Thursday morning.

Such self-awareness was alien to most people, Evelyn had learned. Twenty years of working as a clinical psychologist had taught her that only the hardened few would step out of their boxes and take a good, no-holds-barred look at who they really were. Evelyn modestly placed herself in that category because she wasn't above admitting her own toxicity when needed. Too stubborn, too proud, too reliant on the rush of new triumphs. Writing two books wasn't enough, so she'd written a third. Working out of her home office wasn't enough, so she'd had a sleek new one built right on the waterfront. She'd accomplished both feats in the past year, although her office was still in dire need of jazzing up. Right now, it felt more like a log cabin than a place for people to come and share their mental woes. All she had was a desk, some framed certificates, and a few chairs. None of that old-school couch nonsense in her practice. The best psychologists had moved past that Freudian cliché years ago.

Evelyn pushed her gold-rimmed glasses up her nose and shuffled through the day's caseload. Jim Sanders had been first. He’d received a Silver Star for pulling three of his fellow soldiers from a burning car in Afghanistan, and given how Jim had spent the next twenty years drowning in whiskey, a cynic might say that Jim’s life would have had more meaning if he’d died that day. Evelyn had spent two hours circling the drain while she pretended that survivor’s guilt was a real thing.

Next had been Charlotte Weber, society wife and professional victim. Her particular cocktail of Xanax and martinis hadn't mixed well with her husband's wandering eye, but Evelyn suspected the real problem was boredom. These women married money young, then spent the rest of their lives trying to buy meaning with designer dresses and breast enhancements. No wonder today’s twenty-somethings were all so confused. They didn’t understand that hard work was the real reward.

Evelyn stretched in her Italian leather chair and considered calling it a night. Her townhouse waited across town, empty except for her Maine Coon cat and whatever bottles of wine had survived the week. Tomorrow's first session wasn't until ten, which meant she could still grab eight hours of sleep if she was lucky. She doubted it, though, because insomnia had been her constant companion since the divorce. Andrew had been missing in action since the paperwork came through, not even stopping by to pick up what remained of his clothes. Probably too busy working his way through every impressionable young woman in Granville. Then those women would end up in Evelyn's chair in ten years, talking about how an older man corrupted them during what should have been their prime years. And so completed the circle of life.

She flicked to her last of the day’s case notes. Now here was a real patient. Mr. Caldwell, newly-converted extremist who'd found God in a prison cell. His particular blend of religious delusions and martyr complex made for fascinating study, though she'd never admit that in her notes. The pharmaceutical cocktail Evelyn had prescribed wasn't touching his more colorful beliefs about sinners and salvation, but at least it kept him out of trouble. It was funny, Evelyn thought, how mortality had a way of reshaping your worldview.

It wasn't so long ago she'd been in a similar position. She glanced at the photographs on her table; Her Harvard graduation. The launch party for her second book. A vacation in Tuscany that had been Andrew's last attempt to save their marriage. Photos of children were noticeably absent, as a lot of her clients liked to point out for reasons that continued to elude - and upset - her. That dream had died slowly, marked by years of fertility treatments and carefully scheduled intimacy that felt more clinical than passionate. Now, her biological clock had wound down to silence and left her to mother other people's problems instead of children of her own.

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 said I 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 whispered what 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 clinical distance 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.

It sat on her desk, three steps away. Her body unfroze and she lunged for it, but a sound like splintering bone filled the office as the door ripped free from its frame. The rush of winter air extinguished Evelyn's scream before it could form as a figure in the vague outline of a human tore across the office. No mask, but no clear face either. Just shadows beneath a dark hood. Evelyn caught a glimpse of something silver, a metallic flash that registered as blade or wire or death – but her psychiatrist's talent for analysis died as quickly as her cries.

She and the figure became tangled in an instant, and Evelyn could only chide herself for not locking the door behind her. A liquid line of fire opened across her throat, and Evelyn Summers – Harvard graduate, author, proud collector of others' broken pieces – collapsed to the floor in a heap.

Blood painted art across the hardwood floor she'd spent weeks selecting. Such meticulous attention to detail, such pride in appearances, and now she was analyzing the grain patterns through a crimson filter.

The figure crossed to her fireplace – the one she'd insisted on despite the contractor's protests about load-bearing walls. Heat bloomed in the darkness as flames sparked to life. Evelyn felt their warmth on her face, an odd counterpoint to the growing cold in her limbs. Through dimming vision, she watched the figure hold something metal into the fire. The object caught the light and reflected it back in ways that made no sense to her oxygen-starved brain.

Fascinating presentation of ritualistic behavior , her professional mind noted, even as consciousness began to slip away. Subject displays clear pattern of –

But analysis failed her at last, and darkness claimed Dr. Evelyn Summers before she could complete her final diagnosis.