She persuaded Todd to go with her to her Union Square office by promising no notes and no recordings. He refused to go into her treatment room, and she struggled even to get him to sit down. He paced repeatedly on his long legs, twisting his navy wool cap between his fingers.

“The last thing I remember is Monday night,” he murmured in his low voice, making her struggle to hear him. “I had a tech job over at the planetarium. I help them with their videography sometimes. The job went late. But that’s it. The next thing I knew, I was waking up on the street. In Dogpatch again. The other side of the city.”

“Where in Dogpatch?” Frankie asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. One of the abandoned buildings around there. I hiked a couple blocks and caught a bus.”

“Has it been the same place every time?” she asked.

“No. The same area, but not the same place.”

“Could you find the areas again?”

“Maybe. When I woke up, I wasn’t thinking straight. I just wanted to get the hell away from there.”

“What else do you remember?” she asked.

“There was another girl,” Todd said.

“Did you recognize her?”

“No.”

“Was it the same white room again?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?” Frankie asked.

Todd stopped in the middle of her office. “A knife.”

“What?”

“I have this image of a knife,” Todd said. “I don’t know why or what it means, but I can’t get it out of my head.”

He sat down in the chair opposite Frankie and grabbed hold of the edge of her desk with both hands. “What’s happening to me, Dr. Stein? Don’t tell me you don’t know.”

Frankie tried to concentrate. Todd’s memory of the knife disturbed her. She thought about the smart young college student who lived two doors down from Darren Newman. Merrilyn Somers, singer, gamer, techie. She was a sweet girl who wound up dead on her apartment bed, stabbed seven times with a knife.

“Dr. Stein?” Todd said again, when Frankie didn’t answer. His honey voice was almost a whisper. “Do you know what it’s like when something terrible happens to you? You relive it over and over. It won’t go away. It starts to take over your whole life.”

“Yes, I know.”

That was why patients came to her. To wipe those memories clean like chalk from a blackboard.

“I can’t keep waking up with these nightmares in my head,” Todd said. “I don’t know who I am anymore. I have to do something about it.”

She didn’t like what she heard in his voice or saw in his eyes. “Exactly what are you saying, Todd?”

“I’m going crazy,” he told her. “I’d rather die than go on feeling like this. I have to make it stop.”