I splashed my eyes with icy water, ripped through the matted parts of my hair with a brush until my scalp burned, and shuffled downstairs.

Dad’s office was off the kitchen, and the door was shut, the way he’d left it. I turned the knob until it clicked, and tiptoed inside.

The office wasn’t even that old – it was built just after I was born – but due to his proclivity for buying things second-hand, but it smelled old, like mothballs and dusty mahogany and well-loved books. It was small, but felt cosy instead of claustrophobic; the ceiling lights were warm and golden and the walls a deep red, covered in giant photographs of nature scenes. Mostly Yosemite. Dad also seemed to be fond of mirrors – he had more than a few positioned at seemingly random intervals – and I liked to imagine him asking a patient to look into one and tell him what they saw.

My earliest memories were grainy. Crouching in the den, stubby fingers clutching the windowsill, hoisting myself high enough to get a peek at whatever unfamiliar car had pulled into the driveway. A woman in a blazer putting on five coats of lipstick before coming in. A couple who’d pull up, argue, then never actually come inside. The man with the wrinkles and kind eyes who’d wave at me through the window – until Dad noticed, and then I never saw him again.

But most of them were unmemorable in the best way possible. Normal people. Normal people with normal clothes and faces and jobs. Just with some buried things too.

I collapsed on the patient couch in a heap, positioned the slouchy cushions until they were comfortable under my back, and moved my attention to his desk. Still spotless. Meticulously organized. On top of it sat his computer, some white roses that had gone brown and crispy, and a picture of him and me that Mom had taken at Niagara Falls, on the ferry that travels underneath the spray of the waterfall. Both of us were wearing these ridiculous plastic ponchos. In it, his hair’s not grey, and I’m so small that I barely reach his waist.

Underneath the roses and the picture, of course, were the patient files.

I could have opened the files right there, spilled the contents, turned the endless sheets into wallpaper so everyone could get a look. Maybe Dad had left some freaky cassette tapes behind for me so I could avenge him. Maybe me rifling through the patient files would have distressed Dad so completely, as he watched from the afterlife, that he might have actually been shocked back into existence.

Maybe June Copeland was there.

I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. Ransacking your dead dad’s sock drawer is one thing but his confidential documents seemed another thing entirely. He wouldn’t have wanted me to. I couldn’t do it.