Adrian Vale had just graduated.
Two months ago, he passed the final boards and hung his therapist's license on the pale gray wall of his new clinic. "Adrian Vale, Certified Therapist." The lettering gleamed in sterile gold foil, too cool, too official, too clean. He remembered staring at it that morning with a mug of hot coffee in hand, blinking at the weight of adulthood. It didn't feel real. At 28, he was barely sleeping, still haunted by internship cases, and yet there it was—his name in gold. He could be considered young in this field with the average age of a psychotherapist around 30 to 50 years old.
The office was modest. Two rooms and a hallway above a florist's shop on 12th Street in New York City. The city outside was always loud—buses screeching, dogs barking at invisible things, sirens cutting through the day like razor-thin whispers. But inside, the silence held steady. Almost too steady.
He didn't decorate much. A couch, a chair, a clock that ticked with slow, deliberate clicks like a heart struggling to remember its beat. The rest was filled by people—patients who came with grief, anger, fear. Adrian listened. It was what he did best.
Three weeks before his birthday, she arrived.
Her name was Mrs. Matha Wynn. Her voice was thin, her wedding ring worn to a dull shine. Skin pale like faded parchment. She looked like someone who had lived too long inside her grief. She told Adrian her husband had died the previous winter. She didn't sleep much anymore. She saw things—shadows that stretched wrong across the floor, voices calling from behind the walls, whispering about fire, hunger, and sacrifice.
She said these things with a laugh—the wrong kind of laugh. The kind that didn't leave a face even when the mouth stopped moving.
Adrian should have referred her out. Something in his gut warned him. But he didn't. She was his first client and he wasn't going to let her go that easily. In this business, reputation is everything.
Mrs. Wynn was composed, clear, articulate. Curious. She asked to increase their sessions from once to three times a week. He agreed.
She never spoke of her children. Adrian would only learn later that she had a son and daughter, and a long trail of psychiatric history that somehow never showed up in his intake screening. He felt something was wrong but decided to ignore it.
The morning of his birthday arrived with soft sunlight and a note from his girlfriend, Callie, left on his desk. She had decorated his desk with flowers and placed a box of cupcakes there. Before she left for the back office to sleep. She took an annual leave today to be with him and after his work is done they will go and have dinner together
"Happy Birthday, Doctor Vale. The title suits you well." Her handwriting was messy, but it warmed Adrian's heart.
"Well, it's kind of embarrassing to be called a doctor though."
He had earned a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology and received his psychotherapist license, but he couldn't prescribe medication and never attended medical school.
At 9:30 a.m., Mrs. Wynn arrived.
She was early.
She stood in the hallway, trembling, as though something had followed her inside. Her eyes were wide, fixed on something far behind Adrian's head.
"She's here," she whispered.
"Who is?" Adrian asked.
"The woman in the walls."
They sat.
The session lasted twenty-eight minutes.
She talked, almost joyfully, about fire—about how it cleanses, how it spreads like a secret that wants to be known. She spoke of pain as proof of life, and her voice never trembled.
Then she pulled out the lighter.
Adrian stood immediately. He shouted. But she smiled—a wide grin. The face she made didn't even look human.
She flicked the lighter and lit the molotov cocktail.
Curtains. Carpet. Files.
Flame.
Callie was in the back room.
Adrian turned and ran—not out the door, but toward her. He shouted her name. Smoke filled his lungs like drowning in air. The fire moved too quickly, roaring like it had been waiting for this moment. The hallway became a tunnel of heat and choking ash.
He reached the door. Twisted the handle.
The blast took him.
Fire consumed everything—skin, air, memory.
Adrian Vale burned alive in his clinic on the morning of his twenty-eighth birthday.
He died before he could scream.
He collapsed to his knees as smoke poured around him like a living thing. His throat shriveled under the heat, every gasp slicing his lungs like glass. His skin blistered along his arms, and his vision blurred in pulses—light, then darkness, then light again. Somewhere behind him, the flames had reached the hallway's wallpaper. He could hear it crackle and hiss, devouring memory, wood, and air.
His hands fumbled at the lock again, slippery with sweat and beginning to split open from the heat. "Callie…" he whispered, not sure if her name left his mouth or stayed trapped in his chest. Somewhere in that inferno, he thought he heard her sob.
Or scream.
He didn't know anymore.
His mind was unraveling, thought by thought. It felt like drowning in fire—like the flames weren't killing him, but peeling him away, layer by layer, memory by memory.
The room was spinning. The color of everything had changed. Orange, red, white. No air. No time.
The heat had become a presence—breathing against him, pressing against his ribs like an invisible hand. He felt it moving behind him, licking at his legs, tugging at the fabric of his clothes like a jealous ghost.
And then, clarity.
He saw Callie. Not in front of him. Not behind the door. But in his mind.
Her smile. Her voice saying his name in that mock-serious tone she used when she was pretending to be mad. Her hands, always too cold, always finding him.
A single thought pierced the pain: I should've killed her.
And then the flame touched his spine.
He didn't scream.
He opened his mouth, but the sound never came.
There was only light.
And then nothing.