My new therapist knew things about my childhood that I hadn’t told her. Not guesses, not inferences drawn from what I’d said — specific details, names, dates, the address of the house where I grew up. When I pointed this out in our third session, she looked at me with a calm expression and said: “You told me last week.” I had not been to see her last week.
I checked my calendar when I got home. No appointment on the previous Tuesday. No entry at all. But there was a charge on my bank statement for the correct amount, to the correct payee, time-stamped at two fifteen in the afternoon on the day she said I had been there.
My name is Sam Vell. I had started therapy in March after a difficult winter — nothing acute, nothing that required more than a willing participant and a regular hour — and my GP had recommended Dr. Heller. She was well-regarded, her office was a twenty-minute walk from my flat, and in our first two sessions she had been attentive and precise and exactly what I had hoped to find. I had liked her. I had felt comfortable in a way that I had not expected to feel comfortable quite so quickly.
In retrospect, I was not sure whether the comfort had been earned or constructed.
I went back to my phone calendar and search history. I found no evidence of the appointment she cited. No reminder, no travel, no texts to or from anyone mentioning I’d been out. I lived alone. There was no one to ask whether they’d seen me leave.
The bank charge said I had been there. My memory said I had not.
I called the clinic. The receptionist confirmed the appointment — my name, the Tuesday slot, a note in the system that I had arrived at two-oh-three. I asked whether they had CCTV in the waiting room. She said yes, and that I was welcome to request footage through their data protection office. I submitted the request that afternoon.
While I waited I tried to account for the Tuesday. I had worked from home that day — I was a freelance copy editor, which meant my days were largely self-directed and not always clearly bounded. I had a submission deadline on Wednesday, which meant Tuesday had been a focused day. I had no memory of leaving the flat. No memory of the walk, the waiting room, the session.
I had a memory of being at my desk. Continuous, unremarkable, the ordinary memory of a day at work. And underneath it, or alongside it, or absent from it — I could not determine the grammar — an appointment that my bank account confirmed I had attended.
The CCTV footage arrived six days later. I opened it on my laptop and sat very still for a long time before I pressed play.
The timestamp was two-oh-three. A figure entered the waiting room. I watched it cross to the reception desk, stand for a moment, then take a seat in the chair by the window — the one I always chose, I realised, when I had been there for confirmed appointments. The figure was wearing a coat I owned. The hair was mine. The posture, the particular way of sitting with the weight slightly forward, was mine.
I watched myself sit in that waiting room for nine minutes before being called through.
I had no memory of any of it.
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