The Only Child
By Andrew Pyper
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
The #1 internationally bestselling author of The Demonologist radically reimagines some of literature’s classic masterpieces—Frankenstein, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula—in a contemporary novel driven by relentless suspense and breathtaking emotion.
This is the story of a man who may be the world’s one real-life monster, and the only woman who has a chance of finding him.
As a forensic psychiatrist at New York’s leading institution of its kind, Dr. Lily Dominick has evaluated the mental states of some of the country’s most dangerous psychotics. But the strangely compelling client she interviewed today—a man with no name, accused of the most twisted crime—struck her as somehow different from the others, despite the two impossible claims he made.
First, that he is more than two hundred years old, and he personally inspired Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker to create the three novels of the nineteenth century that define the monstrous in the modern imagination. Second, that he’s Lily’s father. To discover the truth—behind her client, her mother’s death, herself—Dr. Dominick must embark on a journey that will threaten her career, her sanity, and ultimately her life.
A “breathtaking story rife with emotion and chilling suspense” (The Big Thrill Magazine), The Only Child fuses the page-turning tension of a first-rate thriller with a provocative take on where thrillers come from. In his latest novel, “Andrew Pyper’s writing is gripping, and readers will undoubtedly make comparisons to Stephen King” (Library Journal) as they stay up all night to discover the last, unforgettable revelation.
Andrew Pyper
Andrew Pyper was born in Stratford, Ontario in 1968. He is the author of three novels, including international bestseller ‘Lost Girls’ (selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), which is currently in development by John Malkovich for a feature film adaptation. The film rights to ‘The Killing Circle’ have been sold to the award-winning producers of ‘The Last King of Scotland’. Andrew Pyper lives in Toronto.
Read more from Andrew Pyper
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Reviews for The Only Child
66 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Surprisingly, I found this book a compelling read but not too scary, just creepy. It is not something I would normally pick up but the premise caught my attention. From the start, I was hooked. There was certainly a feeling of dread in the first half of the book which had me wanting to read 'just one more chapter.' I loved how Michael was the inspiration for three of the most infamous monsters in literary history - Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula and Frankenstein's monster. Michael's backstory was very atmospheric and I found his character far more interesting than Lily's, who was a fairly uninspirational character.After a great start, which pulled me right in, "The Only Child" became more of a cat and mouse novel, especially in the final third of the book, which had me on the edge of my seat. As for the ending, it was prefect! An entertaining, physiological thriller.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Dr. Lily Dominick, a forensic psychiatrist in New York, winds up interviewing a patient who claims to be her father Michael. Michael has been arrested as a dangerous psychotic but he believes that he is over 200 years old and inspired Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker in their creation of monsters. This premise sounded interesting, but I very quickly started skimming this book because I didn't like Lily. As I progressed, I found a lot of other things that I didn't like about this book.Michael's backstory was kind of interesting but it was inadequately explained and left me with more questions than it answered. As he lured Lily from place to place in an attempt to verify his story, I kept wondering why all of that was necessary. There had to be a more direct way of conveying his story. I might have liked the book more without Lily. There are some mystery men skulking about chasing Lily and/or Michael, for reasons that change from chapter to chapter. There is also no consistency to Michael's motives. I had a major problem with Lily's sexual attraction to Michael, but then Lily lusts after pretty much everyone. If you enjoy reading the following sentences you might like this book more than I did: "She wants to touch this man not to make her fear go away but to enflame it, focus it, invest it with an even more desperate urgency. There are things she wants to do to him. And the notion of doing them now, precisely when she shouldn't want to do them, only sharpens her yearning." Personally, this made me feel a little ill. I could go on, but the bottom line is that I didn't care for this book. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Lily works as a psychiatrist in a high security facility, and one day she is presented with a client who not only claims to be two-hundred year old, but also to be created from a reanimated corpse, just like Frankenstein's creature. He also claims that he inspired not only the obviously similar story of Frankenstein, but Jekyll & Hyde and Dracula as well. As if that wasn't enough, he tells Lily that she is his only child.The book was nothing like I expected at all, and while it presented a little bit of several genres, it is hard to categorize it properly, but I like to have my books neatly ordered so I'll give it a shot and label this one a dramatic gothic horror thriller tragedy.The first half is definitely the better part of the book, as the reader, together with Lily, still tries to figure out what of the stories Michael tells is true. Is he really a man-made creature rather than a human with a disturbed mind? Is he really over two hundred years old or does he just believe so? With each chapter, Lily comes closer to revealing the true history of the man who claims to be her father. But what does that make of Lily? While the focus is mostly on Michael, it is interesting to follow the changes Lily goes through, and the doubts she start raising about her own history - and possible future.While the author cleverly weaves three of the most popular classic gothic novels and their surprising origin into the story, he fails to convincingly convey its historical impact. While it read as a fascinating 'anecdote' from Michaels past, it did little more than entertain for a short moment, rather than turn knowledge about the creation of gothic horror upside down with a stunning revelation. I wonder if it would not have been better to focus on the one masterpiece with the most obvious connection to Michael's story instead of 'collecting' the mention of two other classics as well.As the second half of the book slows down considerably, the ending at least made up for it and brought a fitting, though not totally surprising, conclusion.The book is like a potpourri of genres that evokes equally mixed feelings. While I appreciate the attempt to create something highly impressive, it is a mere shadow of the masterpieces it so boldly utilizes.(Thanks to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for a copy of the book, all opinions are my own)
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5DNF. I usually battle on to the bitter end of a bad book, hoping for redemption or at least for it to move from "bad" to "so bad it's good," but I couldn't with this one. From the main character being a male fantasy of the perfect woman (while she didn't spend time fondling her own breasts, she did possess a perfect and "petite" body, a startling lack of agency in a woman with an alleged Ph.D and a voracious sexual appetite, focused on a vampire who claims to be her Dad. Ugh.), to the idea that a violent offender in a psychiatric prison would be a woman's sexual fantasy, this book made me too angry to continue. Write women as though they were actual people, Mr. Pyper! Andrew Pyper is a good author. I'm a fan. I have no idea what happened here, but there will have to be some seriously good reviews for me to pick up another book by this author. The Killing Circle is a solid and well-written thriller. Read that instead. Unless the thought of a man ripping the ears of a random passer-by is exciting to you. Then you and this book's main character are peas in a pod and I wish you a vampire of your very own.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5When Dr Lily Domick was six-years-old, her mother was killed, ripped apart possibly by a bear – except, if it was a bear, why didn’t it eat the body and why are there no tracks leading to and away from their door. Lily has had to carry the trauma and these questions ever since. It is only made worse when she is assigned to a new patient, one who is charged with a particularly violent crime and who specifically asks for her. He not only admits to the charge but also tells her he knows what really happened to her mother. What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase as he leads her to Hungary and forces her to confront not only him but her past.I’m not sure what I expected when I started The Only Child by Andrew Pyper but this definitely wasn’t it. It started out well, grabbed my attention quickly but unfortunately lost it just as quickly. For one thing, I didn’t much care for Lily or Michael or, well, pretty much anybody. Or perhaps, as others have noted, her feelings towards her ‘father’ were just a bit too creepy. Or perhaps, as Hitchcock pointed out, it’s not the bang but the anticipation of it that makes a good thriller or horror story and here the bang is revealed too early in the tale. Not only that but it just seems to ramble all over the place once it is revealed. I kept putting it down and picking it up days later hoping it would get back to the promise of the first pages. I hoped the ending would save it for me but truth be told, my willing suspension of disbelief was just not up to the challenge of this book. Thanks to Edelweiss+ and Simon & Schuster for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ack!! The hardest review to write? One for a book that is well written but just not a genre you particularly enjoy reading. It’s simply a case of a slight mismatch between book & reader, for which I take full responsibility. So here’s the deal. I’ll tell you what I did like & why I think those with a taste for tales of horror with fantastical beasts should snap this up.The MC is 36 year old Dr. Lily Dominick. Lily is a psychiatrist who works with the scariest, most diseased minds incarcerated at the maximum security Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Centre in NYC. She’s a private, insular woman whose experiences as a child pretty much sealed her fate in terms of career choice. When Lily was 6, she & her mother were living in a remote cabin outside of Fairbanks when the unthinkable happened. It began with a knock at the door. Her memories of that night are hazy at best but what she does remember is the shadow of a large creature standing over her mother’s broken body. The resulting investigation ruled it a bear attack but Lily would beg to differ. Something carried her out to the nearest road where she was found. And even the most well mannered bear doesn’t usually knock before entering. Lily has a gift for connecting with the “monsters’ in her care & she’ll need all her skills for the latest arrival. He’s a man with no name who claims to be over 200 years old. He seems to know all about her, something he explains with another bombshell. He’s her father. Over the next 24 hours Lily witnesses events that cause her carefully constructed world to crash & burn. She doesn’t know it yet but it’s the end of normal & she soon sets off on a personal journey that takes her across Europe & back again. In alternate chapters, we get her father’s story from his journal. He calls himself Michael & tells how he was created in 1811. He’s led a violent & fascinating life, showing his true self to a select few along the way. In an interesting twist he describes how meeting Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker & Robert Louis Stevenson resulted in disappointing versions of himself. There are other threads to the plot including a shadowy group hunting Michael, a possible love interest for Lily & her gradual recovery of memories surrounding her mother’s death.The first 25% of the book was a bit slow. We spend a lot of time in Lily’s head & are privy to her every thought, comment, action & memory. She comes across as oddly flat & although the reason for this is explained later, it makes it difficult to connect with her initially. I much preferred the historical chapters detailing Michael’s life. They’re richly atmospheric & really put flesh on the bones of this original character. For me the book got better as it progressed although the love interest angle seemed unnecessary as the whole story revolves around the relationship between Michael & Lily. But either way, it probably won’t prepare you for the ending. It’s a humdinger that leaves the door open for a possible sequel.So just to be clear…..the rating reflects my enjoyment factor, not the author’s skills as a story teller. If you’re someone who enjoys horror with a twist of fantasy, I urge you to pick up this original tale derived from 3 classics of the genre.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This novel was not at all what I expected - and not in a good way. I'm trying to decide where to start with this book:
I really did not like the protagonist in this novel. She was just so off-putting. Her personality wasn't likable at all and there was nothing about her that made her stand out. It felt like the author made her a distant character so that it would explain the trauma she suffered in the past, but it really didn't work. There was nothing very unique about her, and she also did not behave or think in a very intelligent manner as befit her education and job status. To sum up, the protagonist was terrible.
There were a lot of unexplained elements in the plot. How did this monster just go from one place to another? What are all of his different powers? How can he suddenly talk to people in their heads? It was all very confusing and there was a desperate need for more detail. For every chapter, there should have been at least another one to segue the events. The author presented the story as both Lily's journey as well as journal entries/letters by the monster that explain his past. I would have preferred if there had been actual scenes recounted rather than this format as it would have eliminated some of the holes in the story.
The interactions and relationships between various different characters was really not well done. Lily has some very weird feelings about her "father" and it made me quite uncomfortable. There were quite a few other characters that interacted with Lily and it all seemed so fake and forced that it ruined the story for me.
Finally, this novel didn't deliver on the horror as much as I would have hoped. Instead, it took on a more psychological thriller view. While I have no problems with psychological thrillers, this novel wasn't really a good one as it didn't dig deep enough to back up the conclusions that it made.
Overall, this novel was a bit of a mess. It had so many different elements thrown together that it failed to maintain any semblance of cohesiveness. The protagonist was quite stupid and had no real personality, the interactions between various characters were awkward and fake, and there were gaping holes in this plot that made the whole story collapse. Unfortunately, this was a highly unsuccessful novel and I would have to rate it a 1/5 stars.
I received this novel as an advanced copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Child is the newest book from Andrew Pyper.Dr. Lily Dominick is a forensic psychiatrist, specializing in the 'worst' cases and the most dangerous offenders. Much of her motivation for her chosen profession is the unsolved murder of her mother. Lily was there, but has only hazy, dream-like memories of the first six years of her life. Her latest patient, Client 46874-A, has committed a horrific crime and claims to over two hundred years old. What he also claims is knowledge of Lily's past - and her mother. When he escapes, Lily is driven to find him - and the answers she so desperately seeks.The cover of The Only Child gives you a good idea of the story within. Gothic feel - foggy, old building, mysterious fleeing men wearing a black, somewhat capelike coat..... Uh huh, you got it. Pyper takes inspiration for his story from classic horror literature such as that from Stevenson, Stoker and Shelley. Indeed, they play a role in his tale.Lily was a complicated lead to like. I never felt drawn to her, but rather questioned her choices and motivations. But her decision to pursue Client 46874-A are akin to those horror movies where you shout at the screen....'Don't go in the basement!" We know she is heading into danger, but are curious as to where and what Pyper has planned for her. Pyper has created his own monster with a modern twist. I did find Client 46874-A to be what I expected - he wasn't an overly original creation IMO.Is Client 46874-A truly dangerous? Or are the men hunting him the danger? Lily is torn by what to believe - especially after Client 46874-A reveals more and more of his connection to Lily.The exploration of family and the need to know ourselves figure prominently into Lily's search. But, the sexual tension between the two leads is, well, just icky. Pyper's descriptions of characters and settings are dark, chilling and creepy. The tension escalates as the cat and mouse game progresses. Pyper ends The Only Child with a nice little twist that suits perfectly.For this reader, The Only Child was an okay read, but not a stand-out. Was it my love for those classic tales? My feeling that I had read this story before? Not sure, but this was only a middle of the road read for me.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Dr. Lily Dominick is a forensic psychologist in New York. She’s assigned a very unique patient. This patient with no name not only claims that he’s 200 years old but that he inspired the literary monsters in “Frankenstein”, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” and “Dracula”. He also claims that he’s Lily’s father. Lily’s mother had been murdered when Lily was a young child and she has always longed to know more about her mother and exactly what happened to her. So Lily decides to find out just what this patient knows about her past despite the apparent dangers that such an association would bring.I have always felt that Frankenstein’s monster is one of the most heart breaking literary characters ever created. He was so close to being a part of mankind but would always be doomed to be on the outside, alone and unloved. When I requested “The Only Child”, I had just finished binge watching the last season of “Penny Dreadful” and was still caught up in all of the emotional and suspenseful aspects of that excellent production. So I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this latest re-imagination of a similar monster.This is the first book I’ve read by this author, although I do have quite a few of his titles on my TBR list. The author has such a good reputation that I expected a more complex tale. I expected to feel great sympathy for the monster who was trying to connect with his daughter. The book starts off well and I was pulled right in. But the monster didn’t tug my heart strings at all. Lily’s character was also disappointing and seemed to jump from one feeling to another too quickly. One minute she’s fearing a man who was hunting the monster and the next she was in love with him. What held such promise at the beginning of the book basically devolved into a cat and mouse chase. The ending was not at all surprising to me. The book wasn’t a complete disappointment as there were parts that I enjoyed. I just feel like there was so much promise that never materialized. I loved the basic premise of the book and I would like to try another one of the author’s novels.This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.
1 person found this helpful
Book preview
The Only Child - Andrew Pyper
PART 1
The New World
1
She was awakened by the monster knocking at the door.
Lily knows better than most how unlikely it is that this is real. Through her years of training and now her days in the courtroom providing expert testimony on psychological states of mind, she has learned how shaky the recollections of children can be. And she was only six when it happened. The age when certain things get stuck in the net of real memory, and other things you try to sell yourself on having happened but are in fact made up, turned into convincing bits of dream.
What is verifiably known is that Lily was small for her age, green-eyed, her straight black hair snarled into a nest. The sole survivor. And there was the body, of course. Her mother’s.
She rereads the documents the authorities submitted the same way others return to old love letters or family photo albums, tracing the outlines of faces. It’s an act of remembrance, but something more too. She’s looking for the missing link. Because though the coroner and police reports seem decisive enough, plausible enough, she can see all the ways the facts were stretched to connect to other facts with long strings of theory in between. It was a story assembled to close a file. A terrible, but not unprecedented, northern tale of an animal attack: a creature of considerable size—a bear, almost certainly, drawn by scents of cooked meat and human sweat—had forced its way into their cabin a couple hundred miles short of the Arctic Circle in Alaska and torn her mother apart, leaving Lily undiscovered in her bedroom, where she’d hidden from the screams.
Acceptable on the face of it, as such stories are designed to be. Yet there was so much that wasn’t known it made for a narrative that collapsed upon itself at the merest prodding. Why, for instance, had the bear not eaten her mother? Where could it have gone that the hunters who went after it only a day later failed to find its tracks?
The most puzzling part was how she made it out of the woods.
Three miles to the only road that led, after a two-hour drive, to Fairbanks. The trail to the cabin a set of muddy ruts in summer, but in the subzero depths of February impossible to reach except by snowmobile, and her mother’s Kawasaki remained untouched at the site. When and why did she eventually leave the cabin? How did she get through the woods all on her own?
The year she turned thirty Lily spent her summer vacation conducting an investigation of her own. She traveled north to see the cabin for herself and walked from the site through an aspen forest to the rusting trailer her mother had called their secret place.
She spoke with all the people she could find who were mentioned in the reports.
That was how she came to meet one of the hunters who’d assisted on the case. An old man by the time she took a seat next to the bed where he lay in an old-age home for Native Americans in Anchorage. A man old enough to have nothing to lose and grateful for the visit of a young woman.
My name is Lily,
she told him. Lily Dominick? When I was a girl—
I remember you.
You do?
The one the bear didn’t touch.
He shook his head with a kind of sad amusement, as if at the recollection of a practical joke gone wrong. Except it wasn’t a bear.
How do you know?
Marks in the snow,
he answered, running his fingers through the air to indicate legs. From the cabin to some birch about a quarter mile in. And not bear tracks either.
That wasn’t in the report.
It wouldn’t be. I told the dumb suit about it—the federal investigator—but he didn’t even bother looking because he said the snow had blown it clear. But I saw them fine. Not a machine, not snowshoes. Not boots.
Then what?
He smiled and showed her the half dozen stumps of his teeth. The closest thing? What I told the dumb suit? A horse.
A horse,
Lily repeated. It wasn’t a question. It was to hear from her own mouth something at once impossible and deeply known.
The suits never put that in any of the write-ups. ‘To avoid embarrassment.’ Mine, I guess,
the old man said. "Because there’s no wild horses in Alaska. And no kept horse could have made it through snow that deep even if one had been hauled up that far. It couldn’t have gotten in, which means it couldn’t have gotten out."
It left the question of what happened to be answered by a hypothesis supported by a patchwork of forensics and animal behavior testimony. Lily had been of little help. Deemed unreliable given her age, and traumatized by the shock of losing her only parent. What made her version of events all the more dismissible was the obvious fantasy she’d created. She’d spoken of the dark outline of a ghoul bent over her mother’s form, followed by the appearance of a magical creature that carried her out of the bush on its back. Being a psychiatrist now, Lily knew it to be true: children made things up all the time, not only for pleasure, but sometimes to survive.
Even today she remembers
things from that night. A handful of details recalled with the clarity of a lived event.
She was awakened by the monster knocking at the door.
She thinks of it as this, as a monster, because she knows it wasn’t a bear. Because bears don’t knock before entering. Because the one difference between animals and people is that animals don’t murder, they hunt.
Because she saw it.
2
No matter the weather, Dr. Lily Dominick walks to work every day. Up Second Avenue from her apartment and across the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge to the broad flats of playing fields and institutional campuses of Randalls Island. From there, the most direct way to the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center would be to follow the service road that runs beneath the interstate, but Lily keeps to the river instead, sharing the pathway with only the most serious runners and a handful of bored nannies pushing strollers. It takes a little longer, but she always arrives early. There is nothing in her life to make her late.
On this morning, a blue-domed October wonder, she stops to take in the island of Manhattan she can’t help but see, from this south-facing perspective, as a primary school class picture arranged according to height: the stubby apartment buildings and anonymous housing projects growing into the show-offy towers of Midtown. Yet it’s not the view that holds her. She looks across the churning water at the smallest building of them all—right up front, where she was made to stand surrounded by strangers in the classroom pictures of her youth—and tries to assess herself as she might the accused she puts questions to at work.
Why is the cabin with you today?
Because of my dream last night.
The old dream. The one you haven’t had in years.
It’s been a while, yes.
The dream of riding a white horse through the woods after your mother died?
Not died. Killed. And I don’t think it was a dream. I don’t think it was a horse.
Even now? You still think it actually happened? You still believe in magic?
Lily doesn’t have an answer for these last questions. Which makes her like most of her clients. They can tell you what they saw, how they did it, what arguments the voices in their heads made. But whether any of it was real? It’s like asking a child if the thing living under their bed is real.
She has a gift for the job. One that goes beyond her exceptional performances on exams and the workaholism that was mistaken for ambition but was in fact the comfort she felt walking the asylum’s halls. She finds a music in the shouted obscenities and hellish moans emitted from the cells. And then there are the clients themselves. Mutilators, stalkers, worshippers of their own churches of the occult. Malignant souls that most, including her colleagues, largely regard as beyond understanding. Yet Lily doesn’t see them that way. She can enter the burnt forests and rubbled cities of their minds and find the pathway to their intentions, the core of their wants buried under ash and rock.
Why did you do it?
she asks as the final query in most of her interviews.
I don’t know,
the murderer or rapist replies.
I do,
Lily says.
She starts walking again, toward the pale brick walls of the Kirby ahead of her, its plainness and enormity not even trying to hide the madhouse that it is. Most of the people she works with, the social workers and orderlies, regularly call the building ugly, or as one bow-tied district attorney who repeatedly hits on her and she repeatedly denies likes to put it, the Pandemonium on Hell Gate Circle.
Lily couldn’t disagree more. It was true that where she worked was the sort of place you never wanted to end up. That’s why she thought it architecturally honest for it to appear that way. It looked like hell for a reason.
There were so many other positions Lily could have pursued, cushy appointments where she’d refer violent offenders to public institutions like the Kirby but wouldn’t have to deal with them directly. Safe and sound. But that was never what she was looking for. It was satisfying to find something you had an affinity for in a university lecture hall, but once she arrived at the Kirby she found it electrifying to practice it in the field. Lily had a special talent for hearing echoes of the demonic voices in the thoughts of her clients, a kind of empathy that her supervisor, Dr. Edmundston, believed marked her for even greater success than she’d already enjoyed in her first few years out, though he admitted that it frightened him a little sometimes. It frightened Lily a little sometimes too. But although the Kirby represented the grimiest corner of psychiatric work, Lily found everything she needed in it. She took home more than enough money for a single woman in a less-than-great apartment who doesn’t go out much. And she had never wanted the work to be safe.
You couldn’t admit to it, it was unprofessional, it was wrong, but Lily finds stimulation, something almost like arousal, in glimpsing the most diseased minds. It’s like looking over the edge of a cliff. If you get close enough, you can feel what it would be like to take one more step and have the world slip out from under you.
A runner rushes toward her.
One of the gaunt marathoners who circle the city’s edges day and night. Usually they pass without noticing she’s there. But this one, a woman with dark hair tied into a braid that lashes against one shoulder and then the other with each stride, looks directly at her.
There were only a couple of photos ever taken as far as she knew, waxy squares issued from the lips of Polaroid cameras. Pictures of a woman she would compare her own likeness to and sometimes see herself, sometimes not. But as the running woman glances back as she passes, Lily recognizes her.
The running woman looks exactly like her mother.
3
What are you? Some kind of psycho?
Dr. Lily Dominick punches in her security code at the staff entrance as she mentally edits the indictment that has ticker-taped through her mind.
What are you? Some kind—
Some kind of what?
How would the assistant director of Forensic Psychiatry at one of the leading maximum security institutions of its kind diagnose herself? She knows where to start, anyway. Symptoms. First, a dream from the night before involving her rescue on the back of a white beast. This morning, the memory of a monster as it stood in a pool of blood on the threshold of the cabin’s door. And just now, the hallucination of her mother in the face of a stranger.
She can’t do it. It’s impossible for Lily to see herself as a client because there’s no question in her mind that she is fundamentally sane. Given to anxiety in social situations, emotionally more reserved than she ought to be, functionally asexual for longer stretches than she’d like to dwell on, but clinically normal. These visions are only indicative of her imaginative character, she tells herself, not a disorder in the pages of her bible, Forensic Mental Health Assessment, Second Edition.
It isn’t me, Lily thinks as the door buzzes open and she steps inside the Kirby’s walls. Something in the world has changed today.
Something that’s here. Inside.
SHE SQUEAKS DOWN THE MARBLE floor in the leather flats she traded her sneakers for in a bathroom stall. Choosing comfort over the additional inch or two that heels might afford her, Lily stands five foot four with her back straight. She’s little not just in terms of height but proportionally: the slender fingers, the narrow hips, the elven ears. All her life she’s been described as petite, a word she’s come to hate the whole French language for. Yet she’s aware of making choices that play up to a certain version of the part. The crisply tailored suits, round tortoiseshell glasses, pageboy haircut. She is at once compact and severe, the sort of woman who men and other women alike tend to call intense.
But there was something enticing in her brand of intensity, something many others saw even if she was blind to it herself. If not an invitation, she offered the promise of a remarkable discovery, a surprising gift to be shared if you could find the key that unlocked her.
As she nods good morning to passing coworkers she gets into the elevator that will take her to her office, all the while telling the second voice within her to be quiet. The voice belongs to her, but is distinct from her own. It’s that nasty inner devil all of us have—so Lily believes, a sentimental Freudian at heart—that requires regular taming. Inappropriate. You’d never guess it was there, this other voice, coming from this other part of her, manic and grinning within her.
Lily pulls open the door to the cramped anteroom where her assistant Denise’s desk is surrounded by towering filing cabinets and a sad chair with a crater in the seat. One look tells Lily that Denise has news. That expression of hers that announces there’s something especially juicy to be shared. Her brows raised and her filigreed earrings swinging from recently shaking her head in disbelief.
Do me a favor and stand here a second,
she says as she hands Lily a case file. I want to see your face when you read what this one did.
Can’t we even try to say good morning first?
You’re the one who’s going to have the good morning. Go on, read it.
You know these files are confidential, right?
I can keep a secret.
Denise zips her lips shut.
Lily looks down at the file and sees there’s no name on the identification label on the front, only a number. It’s not uncommon for clients to show up without knowing who they are, or without telling the police if they do. But this file feels different. A vibrating warmth that travels through the stiff paper and into her fingertips.
What did he do?
Lily asks.
Denise gets up from her chair to whisper. Tell you the truth, I don’t want to say.
Why not?
Because it’s so . . . freaky.
And you’re surprised? Look around. We’re in the freak industry.
It’s out before Lily can catch herself. The freak industry? The sort of thing Denise says and Lily voices her disapproval of. But this morning it’s her line.
You got that right,
Denise says.
4
The man is waiting for her. The file has little to say about him other than his namelessness, the violent crime he was arrested for, his strange calm upon his arrest. He sits at the steel table, palms resting on his knees. In his mug shot, his even gaze was suggestive of considerations that couldn’t be guessed at. Now, three strides away, he looks at her and she has even less of an idea what his thoughts may be, even as she can feel him reaching into her head to find hers.
Psycho.
There were so many words you weren’t supposed to use that her second voice loved to whisper in her ear. Psycho, for one. You never called them that. Over the few years of her still relatively new career she’d watched the patients—no, that had changed too, now they were clients—and the words ascribed to them come and go as if borne upon a tide. Bipolar for what was once insane, high-risk for dangerous. But the truth is—the unspeakable truth, for someone in Dr. Lily Dominick’s position—is that the ones who come through the Kirby are all psychos, all dangerous in their ways.
This one the same as the rest.
Lily pulls the security door shut behind her and leaves her hand gripped to the handle a moment longer than necessary to avoid meeting his eyes.
Freaky.
You have to be prepared around people like this, even with their legs shackled to the table that’s screwed to the floor. They can be as tricky with the things they say as with the things they do. But this one—a number on a file ten seconds ago and now real—is a man who has done an awful thing and meets her eyes the moment she raises them, conveying something at once brutal and serene. Their shared gaze is weirdly intimate, the kind of look she imagines passes between lovers. It’s part of what makes this one different from the others. Which is what likely makes him dangerous, even more so than the other psychos she finds chained to the tables in these rooms that both smell like and are painted the color of boiled peas.
Lily reminds herself of the job she’s here to do. This always helps. Once she’s in the room, she makes her own feelings disappear. There’s only the questions she asks and how they answer them.
This is what drew her to forensic psychiatry in the first place: Lily doesn’t treat her clients, she assesses them. There’s no obligation to prescribe or heal, merely to categorize, arrive at a conclusion as to their capacity to do the terrible thing they’ve been accused of, along with their capacity to recognize it as terrible or not. She puts her queries to them and they offer a reply, or hold their silence, or spit yellow bile across the stainless steel table deep within a building more prison than hospital. Sometimes the spit finds her skin.
She releases the door’s handle, takes a step into the room, and sees for the second time that it may not be so easy this morning.
The man sitting at the table, half-smiling at her, is different from the rest. How can she tell? It isn’t his face or his body. Both are pleasing, however unconventionally. The lean strength and broad chest of a swimmer, a power Lily can see even in the interlocked fingers of his large hands. His cheeks and jawline and chin all defined, the skin taut against bone. She guesses he was born in a foreign country, but can’t think of any one place his features might belong to.
What truly sets him apart are his eyes. Wide and deep, alive with animal cunning. Gray irises almost swallowed whole by black pupils. Eyes that speak of multiple thoughts happening at once, though they remain outwardly soft, twinkling at some shared humor. The eyes don’t make him better or worse than the others, or even necessarily sane. Certainly not innocent. Just different.
What name have they given me?
An unplaceable accent. Lily tries to line it up with a culture, a continent, but it sounds to her like a combination of locations and classes. There’s Eastern European at its foundation, then a worker’s Russian, along with a trace of northeastern American, the Ivy League debate club interpretation of Oxford English. She does all this puzzling over a half dozen words.
He clears his throat. Lily hasn’t answered him. She won’t say anything until he speaks again.
Your papers,
he says, nodding at the file tucked under her arm. I’m curious. How do you refer to those who have no names in this place?
We assign them a temporary number. Until we discover the client’s identity.
What if you don’t?
Everyone has a name.
You are mistaken, Doctor.
He reminds her of a professor she had in grad school. The way he would quiz her, nudge her toward new conclusions. In the case of the professor she’d realized, too late, that it was a subtle form of flirtation. With this man she’s sure it isn’t about that. Then again, she’d been sure it wasn’t about that with the professor too.
You had no identification with you when you were arrested,
she says. And you’ve refused to assist investigators by saying who you are. That doesn’t make you nameless, though.
The man smiles. A single shift in his expression that makes Lily feel—what? Overwhelmed. Light-headed and heart-tripping in a way that starts out as a response to charm but quickly turns queasily unpleasant, the first lurch of motion sickness.
Perhaps you will help me,
he says.
Help you?
You are a physician, aren’t you?
Yes.
That comes with professional obligations toward those like me.
Like you?
The accused.
He shrugs and his shoulders make a sound like smoothed bedsheets inside his shirt. The wicked.
How would you describe your illness?
"I said wicked, not ill."
Your wickedness then.
I’ve grown too accustomed to it to describe it.
So you see it as my job to tell you?
No. I wish your aid in another matter altogether.
What would that be?
He smiles again. And again she feels overwhelmed in the same powerfully disorienting way as before.
Perhaps you could resolve the question of my missing name,
he says.
It’s playful. A teasing invitation to a harmless game. But there is a commanding authority behind his words too. Soft, gentle, yet it comes to Lily as an order. His voice so persuasive it’s almost physical.
Lily closes her eyes. Opens