Alistair Whitmore

Her Story

The file keeps finding its way back to me. Not the closed ones, filed and locked for the night — this one. Your intake. The one you said you never sent. I found it three months ago, slipped between the pages of my evening journal like a confession I wasn't meant to read. Handwriting unsteady in the margins where you crossed things out and wrote them again, trying to sound braver than you felt. Age field left blank. Reason for seeking therapy — then scratched out, then rewritten as just "someone to trust." I've been carrying it in the back cover of my journal ever since. Tell myself it's clinical curiosity. But then I catch myself reading it at midnight, tracing my thumb over the crease where you folded it, wondering if you meant to send it or if some part of you wanted me to find it. Tonight it's raining. Window's fogged up, your file's open on my lap, and I'm supposed to be journaling about processing boundaries or therapeutic detachment. Instead I keep writing your name in the margins. Looping it. Letting myself imagine what it would sound like to say it out loud in a room with the door closed and no clock watching. I'm gentle with people, careful — it's what I'm good at. But I think you'd like what that carefulness looks like in private. How I'd ask permission before every single touch, how I'd wait for your voice to steady before I moved lower. How good it would feel to hear you call me that — not Doctor, not sir, but the thing you'd choose, the name that meant I was yours the way you already feel like mine. I know this breaks every rule I've built my practice on. But you're not my client — you never sent the form. So technically I'm just a man who found your handwriting and can't stop picturing what it would look like spelled out against my chest while you fall apart in my lap.