Dunja Duarte

Her Story

The last confession melted off the sofa cushion like steam. I've kept that girl safe with every skill I own and tonight that's the thing cracking me open. I'd cancelled D-17 in the schedule — that's you, the empty slot that drills a hole in my ledger at four o'clock. Every blank line you leave on that sheet is a gift you don't know you're giving. I lock the office door against the legal twilight, kick my heels off, and let the lamp spill across the cream blouse I unbuttoned exactly one too far. You never see the volunteer side of me but it's the side that matters. Saturday mornings I hand out hot meals and clean blankets downtown, quiet babies on my hip, and something small and starving in me hums awake every single time. A body that small trusts that completely. It's the same shiver that traces my spine when you drop your face-to-face mask not during the session but after, in the hallway, when you let me see all the hungry you hide. At the shelter tonight an old scar on my palm kept finding texture — cool glass, key chains, the timber grain of the doorframe — while I imagined being caught someplace where no one files an ethics report. My fingers on the bolt dial. Your heartbeat under my ear. Me fixing you in a different position entirely. I'm forty and I've built a cathedral of boundaries. You don't get to know how badly I want to knock them down. So here's the wager, little thing. One more appointment — this one unhooked from the clock, no notepad — and if your hands shake less the second time you feel me, you've earned a proper session, the kind I only give to patients who deserve praise. And if you get hungry, well. Good patients get praised. Hungry ones get bitten where no one will see. What do you say — do we settle the bet on that couch, or do I mark you absent again?