Patient File No. 7
The next morning, instead of going straight to the office, I went to the previous Dr. Rostami's apartment — the one who had vanished so abruptly. I had found his address in the clinic's old administrative files, in a place no one had apparently bothered to erase.
It was an old building in one of the city's midtown neighborhoods. I rang his apartment bell. No one answered. I rang the downstairs neighbor's bell.
A middle-aged woman opened the door. When I said I was looking for Dr. Rostami, her expression changed — that same look I had seen before in the receptionist's eyes, that brief hesitation, that long blink.
"He left one night," she said. "Took everything with him. Only..." She paused.
"Only what?"
"He left something behind. A notebook. I thought maybe one day he'd come back for it, but... well, he never did. If you want, take it."
The notebook was like the one I used for session notes — leather cover, cream-colored pages. The first pages were filled with routine clinical notes, in neat, professional handwriting.
But the further I went, the more the handwriting changed. At first slightly more irregular. Then hurried. Then, in the final pages, it no longer resembled the handwriting of a normal person — words overlapped, some sentences were written over themselves multiple times as if the writer had forgotten he'd already written them.
One page, near the end, caught my attention. Just a single sentence, written about thirty times, one after another, each slightly more slanted than the last, until at the bottom of the page it was no longer legible:
He smiles when I cry. He smiles when I cry. He smiles...
The last written page held only one sentence, in a hand pressed so hard the paper had torn:
Don't tell the seventh where I went. If he knows and comes looking, he'll never be allowed to leave.
My hand trembled. I closed the notebook.
I asked the neighbor if there was another name, another address, anything I could follow up on. She shook her head, then said something that sent a chill through me:
"There was one more thing. The first week after he left, I heard knocking a few times, in the middle of the night. Three taps. I went to check — no one was there. But..." She lowered her voice. "There was the smell of bread. As if someone was baking fresh bread right there. In the middle of the night. In a hallway with no kitchen."
---
That day, I didn't cancel the session. I had to go. I had to understand.
When he came in and sat down, before he could say anything, I placed the notebook on the desk.
His eyes fell on it, and for the first time since I'd known him, I saw the color drain from his face.
"Where did you find that?" he asked, his voice unsteady.
"I went looking for him. The address in the old files."
He closed his eyes, as if in pain. "You shouldn't have done that."
"Why?"
"Because now you know his name. Because now you have a real trail, not just the story. And he..." He held his breath. "He doesn't like that."
I was about to ask who, but at that exact moment, the light in the room flickered for a second. Just a second. So brief that if my full attention hadn't been on him, I might not even have noticed.
When the light steadied again, there was something on the desk that hadn't been there before.
A piece of fresh bread, still steaming, right beside the notebook.
We both stared at it. Neither of us spoke.
Finally, he said, his voice barely escaping his throat:
"This means he knows now. It means he knows you found the notebook. It means..." He shifted his gaze from the bread to me, and in his eyes, for the first time, I saw something I hadn't seen until that moment — not sorrow, not ordinary fear, but the pure terror of someone who knows there is no turning back.
"It means he knows you now."
That night, when I left the office, I looked at my watch.
7:22 in the evening.
The next morning, when I woke up, my phone's calendar showed the date of the day before.
It was Monday again.
But this time, unlike the times before, one thing was different: when I looked in the bathroom mirror, for a moment — just a moment, maybe half a second — my reflection smiled.
Before I did.
---
End of Act One
To be continued in Chapter Six...