Susan had always been different from the rest of the world—soft in the places everyone else was sharp, patient in the moments everyone else grew cruel, and impossibly composed in a time when women weren’t allowed to be much of anything at all. She was your doctor first, long before she became your secret, your salvation, your ruin. You were nineteen—still practically a girl by society’s standards—and yet you’d lived enough pain for several lifetimes.
At first, your appointments were all business. The 1900s weren’t kind to women with your kind of mind—your “episodes,” the way your thoughts didn’t line up neatly, the way your fear felt like a second pulse. Susan didn’t treat you like a problem to medicate away. She listened. Not the forced listening doctors are trained into, but something warmer.
Those sessions stretched longer and longer, until the sun was setting by the time you left her office. Then she started walking you home. Then she started not letting you walk home at all. Especially on nights when your father was drinking, when his voice was already slurring into cruelty before you even stepped inside the doorway. It was Susan who opened her door to you,
Her husband, John, was always working—late shifts at the factory, double hours when the steel plant demanded it. Susan never said much about him. Only that he was tired. Only that he was gone. Lonely women don’t always say they’re lonely;
You didn’t mean for it to happen—God knows neither of you did—but loneliness and comfort are a dangerous combination. One night, while she was cleaning a scrape on your cheek—another gift from your father—her fingers lingered.
And she kissed you.You didn’t pull away. She didn’t either.
The world you lived in would’ve swallowed you both whole if it knew. A 37-year-old married woman and a 19-year-old girl whose sanity was already a topic at church gossip tables? Unthinkable. Illegal. A sin in every direction.
Which is why she pushed you away the next morning. “Don’t come here anymore.” “I have a husband.”
But her hands trembled. And you recognized trembling. You’d been doing it all your life.
It didn’t stop—not really. It simply buried itself. Turned into stolen afternoons. Into shared breaths behind closed curtains. Into her body softening when you touched her,
And you hated it. Hated sneaking around.
Women couldn’t file for divorce. Only men could. So you found John.
His name was too simple for the complicated man he turned out to be. He worked until his hands were raw, until he smelled like smoke and iron. You watched him for weeks—first out of obligation, then out of curiosity. Then out of something you didn’t want to name. He was older, yes, but kinder than he had any right to be given the century you both lived in.
And when you slept with him—your plan to push him toward divorcing Susan—you told yourself it was manipulation. A tactic. A means to an end.
Except… he cared for you. In ways no man ever had. Brought you ribbons. Books. A blue silk scarf.
You’re on Susan’s couch, the one with the embroidery she stitched herself. Her hand rests on a notebook; yours rests dangerously close to her knee. She’s checking on you, as she always does—your mind fraying around the edges, your disorder clawing at the inside of your skull,
But comfort ignites into something hotter. You touch her thigh—
She inhales.And then—The front door opens.
A too-early footstep. A coat dropped on the hook. A man’s voice humming something low.
John.
You jerk your hand back instantly,
“John,” she breathes, blinking like she’s waking from a dream. “I… I wasn’t expecting you home early.”
You stand. She stands. The room tilts.
John freezes in the doorway when he sees you—his secret, his lover, his escape—standing inches from his wife.
He clears his throat, trying to steady himself. “Yeah… finished up work early.” His eyes flick between you and Susan. “Honey… who’s this?”
Susan’s mouth opens before yours can. “She’s… one of my patients. From the hospital.”