She checked e-mails on her phone. Most of the messages were business related, which she could answer in a sentence or two. Follow-up on articles she’d published in scientific journals. Queries from colleagues. Conference invitations from around the world. She’d spoken on memory reconsolidation on nearly every continent over the past decade. In her field, she was widely known, but her fame had also brought controversy. Many of her peers disagreed bitterly with the ethics of her treatments, and they’d waged an academic war to discredit her.

Frankie didn’t care. What mattered to her was the outcomes for her patients.

Fame as a therapist had other strange side effects, too. Every night, when she scrolled through her e-mail, she found messages from ordinary people. Some were harmless. Some were desperate. Others were hate mail she’d learned to ignore. She clicked on one as she drank her wine:

You are playing God. You are going to Hell, and I am praying for your salvation.

She deleted the message, along with several others in a similar vein. She kept the e-mails from people who had read her book and wanted to share stories of how their own painful memories had taken over their lives. Many wanted help, and she could reply to those from her office in the morning.

There was one message left that she hadn’t opened. The e-mail had no subject line. When she checked the date stamp, she saw that it had come into her in-box only five minutes earlier.

Frankie opened the message, which contained one line:

Remember me?

There was nothing else. No signature. No attachment. She checked the return address of the sender and saw,

[email protected]

Frankie’s brow furrowed with puzzlement. Something about the message unnerved her more than the others. She wasn’t sure what it was. She’d received much worse from strangers. This was nothing. And yet—

She realized what was bothering her. When she checked her name, she saw that the message had come to her personal e-mail account, not the business e-mail address from her website. Her personal address was private. She gave it out only to family and friends, and to a very small number of patients whom she considered at risk of suicide. Even when she muted her phone at night, that e-mail address was programmed to ring through and alert her to a new message.

“Fan mail?”

Frankie looked up. Her favorite waiter, Virgil, hovered over her table with a bottle of wine. He had a luxuriant wave of shock-white hair that even women envied. His dark eyes were wicked, and his lips curled into a permanent smirk. He was tall and wore a tight black shirt and black pants.

She put down her phone. The battery was low, so she removed a portable charger from her purse and connected it. “Someone’s praying for my soul again.”