I still had a key to their apartment, but it was in my dresser at home. I knew they kept a spare on top of the doorframe, a place so obvious it irritated me, yet out of some kind of schadenfreude I’d never told them that everyone knew to look there for the key. Who were they fooling? I had always half hoped, as a child, that a burglar would come while we were away, stealing all of my parents’ psychology books, the copies of the magazines they’d been published in, their wedding album, everything that had nothing to do with me. I was terrified, though, that the burglar would come while we were home—terrified or desirous? I remembered lying awake at night, starting at every noise, wondering if this was the night he would come to kill us all; I had gory, fearful fantasies of finding my parents’ bodies laid out on the kitchen floor…yet I wondered, now, if there was a wish embedded there, that they would be gone, that I would be free, that the “burglar,” as I still thought of him, would see me, my sweet young face, my eyes big from pain, and would take mercy on me, would make me his.

The problem with the key was that I was too short to reach it. Once in a while I could jump, swipe the doorframe, and manage to knock it to the floor—yet this time, I was having no luck. I looked down the hallway; at the other end, a neighbor had left an umbrella out to dry. On the way, I passed the door to my parents’ office and paused for a moment, pressing my fingers into the door. It was possible they were inside, doing research or writing, nonclinical work, yet it was unlikely on a Sunday. Anyway, if they were, I shouldn’t disturb them, I should still wait for them in the apartment. Yet I felt rooted there, my fingers on the door, remembering all the times I’d stood at our peephole, peering down the hall, watching to see who came.

Like Olivia. Client Z. Back then, her hair had been long; I remembered watching from our door as it swished along her back like a metronome. I thought of the way she threw back her head to laugh once, at something my father had said when she opened the door. She had bared her throat to the light, and I could see through the peephole the ridges of her windpipe. Her mouth opened to the ceiling. Her neck so delicate, beckoning my father to place his lips there. The laugh had ended, and he had invited her into his office, and then he had closed the door. I had run to my room, slammed the door, sobbed, touched myself—

Had they been fucking each other?