The last client of the day was always the hardest.
Not because the work was heavier. Because by four o’clock, Rachel had been listening for six hours straight, and her face hurt from holding the expression of a person who found everything manageable.
Douglas was forty-three and worked in insurance.
“I’ve been doing a lot of reading.” He leaned toward his camera. The bookshelf behind him was staged, the same three titles visible in every session, spines too clean to have been opened. “About empaths. I think that’s what’s been wrong. I absorb people’s energy. That’s why relationships are so difficult for me.”
Rachel’s hands rested in her lap. Outside her window, a cloud moved across the last strip of afternoon sun, and the room dimmed slightly, the cream curtains going the color of old paper.
“Tell me more about that.”
“Women can sense it. They know I feel things more deeply than most men. It scares them.”
The diffuser on her desk put soft lavender into the air. She breathed it in, slow and even. Douglas had been in therapy for four months and had not once asked a question about anyone other than himself. His ex-wife appeared in his sessions only as a character who had failed to recognize something in him.
“What would it look like,” Rachel kept her voice level, “if the difficulty weren’t about them sensing something, but about something you were or weren’t offering?”
A pause. Douglas’s face cycled through two or three things before settling on patience.
“I think you’re misreading the dynamic.”
“Maybe.” She let it sit there.
He talked for twenty more minutes. Rachel reflected. She validated what could be validated and sat with the rest. When the session ended, she closed the laptop and held the silence in both hands.
She was good at this.
