“Guilt.” Cora swallowed again. She looked away and stared at the plant in the corner. It was a large ficus, one of four plants in the office. Frazer’s office didn’t have anything in it. It was incredibly boring. Maybe she needed a plant.

“Guilt?”

Questions like that, so simple on the outside. Just Cora’s own words, again, thrown at her. “For lots of reasons.”

“Want to tell me one of those reasons?” Doctor Massey rarely blinked. It was disconcerting. Her eyes only watched Cora, saw through her, and chipped at little parts Cora had kept carefully hidden.

“I tried to tell Alec once before. More than once, really.”

“And what did he say?”

Cora tugged at her skirt, smoothing it over her knees. “That I couldn’t do that to him. That he’d be a mess. That I would…”

This time Doctor Massey didn’t ask anything. She waited for Cora to finish.

“That I’d be nothing without him.”

Doctor Massey’s face was still so neutral. How did she do that?

“How do you feel about the idea of not being married? Do you feel like you’d be nothing?”

For some reason, tears filled Cora’s eyes and she had to swallow past a lump in her throat that felt so big it could choke her.

“I’d feel…”

“What, Cora?”

“Free.” She took a deep breath. “I would feel free.”

* * *

Paperwork was never fun. But at least it was distracting.

Files and folders lined the walls of the patient file room on the maternity ward. At one of the cramped desks, Frazer was glad it was twelve o’clock and all the nurses were off fulfilling general observations and giving medications. It meant she had the room to herself.

The hospital was mostly paperless. This room only held patient histories for more complex notes. To have enough computers free for all the doctors, nurses, midwives, social workers, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists to update patient files every few hours was expensive and kind of insane. The good old patient file wasn’t going anywhere in that regards.

There was something soothing about writing out her observations by hand. Filling in comments, signing her name at the end. Being able to read back and see what other professionals had written.

After signing off on her current notes, Frazer searched the files for a particular name, an apparent recovering addict. Never an easy case. One of the nurses had paged her to ask about getting her into Frazer’s programme, and she needed to look through her notes.

That was how Cora found her.

One minute, Frazer was alone and elbow deep in the patient’s past, and the next, she felt someone’s eyes on her. She glanced up from her wheelie chair to see Cora leaning against the door frame, watching her. It was almost creepy.