The Therapist’s Patient

Part I: The Silent Storyteller

They say silence is golden.

They’ve never sat across from someone who wears silence like a second skin.

Her name—well, she never gave one. Just a number. 47. Like a government experiment or the final page in a chapter you were never supposed to read. She didn’t speak. Didn’t blink too much. Just sat in my office and wrote.

I’m Dr. Elias Voss. A therapist by trade, a cynic by nature. And in another life, maybe I would’ve become a writer—if not for the whole nervous breakdown thing in ’09.

Patient 47 walked into my life on a Thursday. Rainy, naturally. Hood up. Eyes down. Standard referral from the ER. Claimed trauma-induced mutism. I didn’t ask. Some questions aren’t meant to be answered. At least, not out loud.

Instead, I slid a notebook across the desk and said, “Tell me how you’re feeling.”

She wrote:

“The Man in the Attic.”

He waits until the lights go out. The house settles. Then he moves. Not like a man—more like a memory, shifting through shadows. He never breathes, but you feel it anyway. The pressure on your chest. The sense that you’re being erased, one night at a time.”

⸻

I read it three times. It was brilliant. Terrifying. Too vivid to be random fiction.

I asked, “Did you write this before today?”

She didn’t respond.

I filed it under “creative coping.” Trauma can manifest as storytelling. That’s the easy answer. The safe one. The wrong one.

The next morning, I read the news:

“Unsolved Homicide. Victim Suffocated in Attic.”

Same city. Same method. Same date.

That’s when the notebook stopped being therapeutic.

And started being evidence.

Part II: Scribbled Confessions

Every session, a new story. One per week. All typed in silence. All disturbing.

One was about a woman drowning in her bathtub while her baby watched.

The other matched a missing persons case from 2012—the man was never found, but in her story, he was buried under a freeway construction site.

I started fact-checking each one. At first, I thought she had access to crime scene details. Maybe she was a detective’s daughter. Maybe a psychic, or a morbid Reddit troll with too much time and a VPN.

But then I found The Notebook.

Buried in a cardboard box from my undergrad days. Leather-bound. Faded spine. My old journal. Half-full of ramblings from when I wanted to write noir fiction. Half-full of things I didn’t remember writing.

And the handwriting—it matched hers.

Or rather… mine.

That was the first time I questioned if I was going mad.

The second time was worse.

Part III: Blackouts and Breadcrumbs

I started having blackouts. Small at first. Gaps in time. A misplaced set of keys. A cup of coffee on my desk I don’t remember making. Then larger ones—entire evenings missing. Phone calls I couldn’t recall. Notes on my calendar in my handwriting that I’d never written.

I asked my colleague, Dr. Kane, for an informal consult. “Stress,” she said. “Maybe dissociation.”

Then she squinted at me and said, “Elias… you ever treat someone who wasn’t real?”

I laughed. It was a joke. It had to be.

But when I checked the clinic’s logs, Patient 47 wasn’t in the system.

No intake form. No payment. No insurance.

Just me. Her. And a pile of stories that knew too much.

Part IV: The Girl Who Wasn’t There

I showed one of her stories to a detective friend of mine—Lena Moreau. Sharp eyes. No patience. She read it, silent, then said, “Where’d you get this?”

“In a therapy session,” I said. She raised an eyebrow.

“Your patient just described the Armstrong case,” she said. “Word for word. That file’s sealed.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Lena asked to meet 47. I scheduled the session. She never showed up. Not even in the waiting room footage.

Lena called me that night. “Either you’re lying, or someone’s messing with your head.”

What she didn’t say—but I could hear it in her voice—was:

Or you’re the one doing it.

Part V: Elias, Rewritten

It was my fifth blackout that did it.

I woke up in my office, surrounded by notebooks. Pages torn out. Taped to the walls. Scribbles layered over one another. “She is me” written again and again.

I checked the security footage.

It was me.

But I wasn’t… me.

The man on the screen wore my clothes. Had my voice. But he was acting. Like he was performing me. A shell. A puppet.

He wrote with a left hand. I’m right-handed.

In the video, I called myself “47.”

Part VI: The Facility

I tracked down Dr. Kane again. She looked older than I remembered. Tired. Like she’d buried a thousand secrets and one had come back to life.

“You were a patient, Elias,” she said. “Not a doctor.”

I laughed. But it came out wrong. Hysterical. Hollow.

“You suffered a psychotic break at 19. You created a therapist persona as part of your delusion. You used to tell stories in therapy—stories that predicted real crimes. No one ever figured out how. Maybe you saw things no one else did. Maybe you did them.”

I asked her, “Why didn’t you stop me?”

She said, “You were already gone.”

Part VII: Patient 47

Now I sit in a white room with no windows.

They say I attacked someone. A woman named Lena. A detective.

They say I wrote stories about murders before they happened. They say I’m dangerous. A schizophrenic. A sociopath. A prophet.

But I know the truth.

I’m not Elias. Not really. I’m Patient 47.

Elias was the mask I wore to survive.

He was the story I told myself so I wouldn’t have to be the villain.

But now the story’s done.

And the silence is back.

But this time, it’s not heavy.

It’s home.

Epilogue: The Last Page

Weeks later, Dr. Kane receives a package.

Inside: A story. Handwritten. Fresh ink.

“The Doctor Who Forgot.”

⸻

“She lied to him. Protected him. Buried the truth. But stories, like rot, rise to the surface. In the end, she sat alone. And the next story… was hers.”

⸻

She looks up. Heart racing.

Someone is watching from across the street.

He smiles.

The pen in his hand gleams.

And he begins to write.

The end.