DAN’S STAR WARS ALARM clock wakes him at 6.30 a.m. He rolls over and punches Darth Vader on the head, then climbs out of bed and stretches. In the corner, his yellow Labrador, Fitz, yawns, and it sounds like Chewbacca, which always makes Dan laugh. Together they pad downstairs, Fitz’s tail drumming a beat on Dan’s bare legs as they go. Fitz checks that the garden is as he left it while Dan fires up the coffee machine. Dan counts the whirs and ticks but manages to turn the tap on and off only four times. Fitz comes back in time to hear the hiss of hot water, then sits and waits for the milk from Dan’s cereal bowl.

Dan has a new client today and that makes him nervous. It takes him longer than normal to button up his shirt and he sweats with the effort. He thinks about having another shower but doesn’t have time. This makes him sweat more. He knows the only way to stop the sweating is to start the counting. He tells himself it won’t really stop the sweating. The left side of his brain knows he’s being stupid. The right side tells him this three times, then three times more. On the second set of threes he turns the light switch on and off. On the third set he counts his vinyl records. He wants to reorganize them by era, not colour, but he knows this would make him very, very late.

He pats Fitz sixty times instead. Fitz licks his nose with a wide pink tongue. Dan breathes him in deeply, fur and dog and friend, and says he’ll walk him later. Fitz offers a paw, which Dan shakes. ‘Deal,’ he says, and Fitz gives a single solemn bark in return, then lumbers back out to the garden. ‘Don’t chase that seagull,’ Dan says. ‘It’s not just your garden. You need to share it with the birds,’ but it’s too late. Fitz is already haring down the narrow pathway to yip and yap a symphony at the trespasser.

Dan is seven minutes late to work. His new patient isn’t due until ten, but he likes to have a full hour to study the referral notes beforehand and he worries he might miss something vital with the seven minutes he’s lost. Even after two years and seven months, Dan is still waiting for someone to realize that he is entirely unsuited to being a counsellor. Waiting makes him nervous. It always has. His mother called him an impatient child, but it wasn’t that. It was the not-knowing, the unforeseen in any circumstance. He was not impatient, he was uneasy.

He’s twenty-five now, and still fears what might lie ahead, beyond the next bend. The sooner Alan, the owner of the practice Dan works for, realizes that Dan is masquerading as a compos-mentis professional and fires him, the better.