Friday afternoons in Harlowe Ridge always felt drowsy. The small town slowed down early shops closing by five, streets quiet by dusk, and even the breeze felt gentler, as if the entire place were settling into a long exhale.
The Harlowe Ridge Community Health Center sat at the edge of town, tucked between the old library and a dog grooming shop that always smelled faintly of wet fur. The building itself was a quiet white rectangle, unremarkable except for the hand-painted mural on one wall, flowers, bright colors and smiling families. Someone had tried very hard to make the place feel warm.
Inside, the waiting room hummed with soft, looping instrumental music. The lights were warm but dim, arranged in low sconces that turned the walls a muted honey gold. A young receptionist offered Donald a patient, well-practiced smile when he checked in, but he barely glanced at her. He walked the hallway with the same careful, measured steps he always used.
Second door on the left. Dr. Evelyn Hart. Psychotherapist. He had been seeing her for a week now, at the request of his adoptive parents, though they couched it as something normal.
"Lots of kids talk to counselors," Anna had said, a little too brightly. "It's good for you."
Donald never corrected her. He simply went.
Dr. Hart's office was designed to be comforting. Not cozy, comforting. There was a difference. The first thing people noticed was the light. Soft, warm and purposely indirect. A tall lamp stood in the corner with a shade of frosted amber glass, casting a gentle glow across the room. Nothing sharp. Nothing fluorescent. No angles that might feel like interrogation.
The furniture was all rounded edges and soft fabrics. A cream-colored sofa with plush cushions. Two matching armchairs. A small coffee table made of pale wood with no visible nails or metal, just smooth joints and gentle curves. A woven rug in muted earth tones spread across the floor, anchoring the space with quiet calm.
On one wall hung framed watercolors—mountains, rivers, an abstract wash of blue that always reminded Donald of drowning, though he could never explain why. A faint smell of peppermint and old paper lingered in the air, pleasant enough if one didn't think too hard about it.
The bookshelf behind her desk told even more. Trauma studies. Developmental psychology. Articles pinned in neat, meticulous rows. Notes and sticky tabs in soft pastels. A small plant with wide green leaves sat on the window ledge, thriving from attention.
Everything in the room suggested she cared, or at least tried to.
She looked up from her notes when Donald entered. Dr. Hart was in her mid-thirties, maybe a little younger, with long blonde hair she kept tied in a low, neat ponytail. Her features were delicate but sharp in certain lights, high cheekbones, a straight nose, brown eyes that held both compassion and clinical alertness. She wore thin-framed glasses today, ones she only used when reading for long periods. Her clothing was soft and neutral, light sweater, tailored slacks, nothing flashy. She dressed the way she spoke: calm, warm and measured.
But the hair…The blonde hair, that was the problem.
For Donald, it was the source of his unease. He tried not to stare at it, but he couldn't help the flicker beneath his skin each time he saw her. Because somewhere in the disjointed labyrinth of his fragmented memories, there was a woman with blonde hair. Not the same. But close enough that his mind reacted before he could stop it.
A face behind thick glass…a soft hand on his shoulder calm and gentle, but wrong. And then…pain, a white room. He swallowed the memory before it surfaced fully.
Dr. Hart's eyes softened. "Donald. Right on time, as always."
He nodded once. He always arrived precisely when he was supposed to. Never early. Never late.
"Come in. Sit wherever you like."
He chose the chair he always chose, near the corner with his back back to the wall, facing the door. A position of control and Safety. Dr. Hart closed the file on her lap and set it aside, giving him her full attention.
There was always something unnerving about her focus. Not because she was intense, but because she was so… deliberate. She didn't rush. She didn't miss things. She noticed details other adults overlooked—pauses in his breathing, tension in his jaw, the way he tracked
"Long week?" she asked softly.
He shrugged. "Normal."
She leaned back just a little, posture open and unthreatening. "How's school been?"
He stared at the watercolor mountains.
"Fine."
The therapist's soft voice fades into the background as Donald's thoughts slip back. Uninvited, yet impossible to suppress. The past week in the town replays in his mind, not as a sequence of memories, but as pieces of a puzzle he cannot quite fit together.
Each morning, the same vendor set out the same fruits in the same order. Apples, then oranges, then bananas. Always three neat rows, perfectly aligned, as if placed by a machine. Donald remembers pausing once, staring too long, realizing the vendor's hands moved with identical precision each day. No hesitation and no variation.
Another neighbor watered the same patch of soil at the exact same time. 6:32 a.m. Always 6:32 a.m. The man's arm rose and fell in a rhythm so steady it might as well have been metronomic. Children laughed in the same rhythm. High pitch, low pitch, a burst and then a pause. Each day the same actions repeated like a loop.
Doors opened and closed with identical timing, hinges creaking the same notes, like a choir following a conductor hidden behind the curtains. And the smiles, the smiles were the worst. Smiles that looked warm but felt copied, as though the whole town had been programmed to respond to him with a single expression.
A perfect loop.
A week of repetitions so seamless that noticing them felt like a punishment. Once he saw the pattern, he couldn't unsee it. It was everywhere: in greetings that arrived at the same second each day, in footsteps that matched yesterday's rhythm, in conversations that sounded rehearsed. Every movement, every word echoed the one before, as if their life itself were following a script. As if the whole town were rehearsing.
The therapist shifts in her seat, but even that motion feels suspiciously smooth to him. Donald lowers his gaze to avoid meeting her eyes. He doesn't want her to see the unease settling like dust behind his thoughts.
His parents had been the strangest part, or maybe it was him. He isn't sure anymore. They mirrored each other far too often. If his mother tilted her head while listening, his father would tilt his the same way. If one crossed an arm, the other did too. Their reactions came in pairs, synchronized and predictable—almost rehearsed. Like everything else in the town.
He tries to recall a single moment from the week where they behaved differently, where they broke out of sync, where they spoke or moved without mimicking the other. He searches for it the way a drowning man reaches for air. But his mind offers nothing.
The therapist voice draws him back from his thoughts with a continuum of questions, the same she had asked last session.
"Donald? You're doing well. Truly."
The words echo in the room as Donald leaves the room. He walks out of the health center, the door clicking shut behind him. The next place he would go, the place he always drifted to when his mind felt like an unstable puzzle, the park. Where the world was open enough for him to breathe. And where silence didn't ask questions.