His Broken Mind•

I count to thirty under the hot water, watching the antiseptic soap turn my knuckles an angry shade of pink.

The tap water scalds, but I don’t turn it down. Twelve hours of flu season has left my hands raw, cracked at the knuckles, and I need to feel the burn.

I need to know I’m still here. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.

I shut off the faucet and shake the excess water into the sink, reaching for the paper towel dispenser with damp fingers.

The clinic is chaos.

I push through the bathroom door and step into a wall of noise. Wet wool coats hang heavy on the rack by the entrance, dripping melted snow onto the linoleum.

Three toddlers are crying in overlapping rhythms while their mothers juggle diaper bags and snotty tissues.

A television mounted in the corner plays cartoons too quietly to compete with the coughs rattling through the waiting room like loose gravel in a tin can.

The air smells of cough syrup, damp mittens, and the particular sour-sweet rot of sick children who have been waiting too long.

I head for the front desk, weaving between a stroller and a little girl clutching a half-eaten lollipop.

The sticker basket is nearly empty. I kneel beside it, restocking from the supply drawer princesses for the girls, superheroes for the boys, though I’ve learned never to assume.

A small boy with a Spider-Man backpack is pressed against his mother’s legs, his face flushed with fever, his eyes wide and suspicious.

“Hey there,” I say, keeping my voice soft. I don’t reach for him. I let him look at me first. “That’s a pretty cool backpack. Does Spider-Man help you fly?”

He doesn’t answer. His bottom lip trembles.

I pull a sticker from the basket Batman, not Spider-Man, because offering the same thing feels like a bribe, and Batman is an invitation.

I hold it out on my palm, low, letting him choose to take it or not. “I need to check how brave you are. Do you think you can hold this for me?”

I produce the thermometer from my pocket, but I don’t move toward him. I wait. His small hand uncurls from his mother’s knee. He takes the Batman sticker. He looks at it. Then, slowly, he reaches for the thermometer.

“Brave,” I whisper, and his mother exhales a laugh that sounds more like relief.

I feel the weight of eyes on me and glance toward the hallway. Dr. Marcus stands there, arms crossed over his white coat, his silver hair catching the fluorescent light.

He nods once. Approval.

I offer a small smile and turn back to the waiting room, collecting empty juice cups and crumpled tissues, anything to keep moving.

Mary meets me at the supply closet, her dark hair pulled back in a messy bun, her own hands chapped from sanitizer. She presses a patient chart against my chest and leans in close, her voice dropping to a murmur.

“There’s a weird guy in a white truck,” she says. “Been circling the block for twenty minutes. He pulled up when Mrs. Gable was leaving and just sat there.”

I tuck the chart under my arm and reach for another box of stickers. “Lost tourist?”

“Maybe. But he asked me if we had any ‘special needs’ doctors on staff.” Mary shudders, a quick ripple of her shoulders. “Gave me the creeps. Wide eyes. Didn’t blink enough.”

I glance toward the front windows, but the blinds are drawn against the November dark. The clinic sits at the edge of town, surrounded by maple trees that have already dropped their leaves, and strangers are rare this time of year.

Still, it’s a small town.

People get lost.

“He’s probably trying to find the urgent care on Mill Road,” I say, though something in my chest tightens. “They handle more specialized cases.”

Mary shrugs and disappears into an exam room with her chart. I tell myself to forget the truck. I have six more patients before we close, and Dr. Marcus has already warned me that the cold season is only beginning.

The hours blur.

I take temperatures and distribute stickers and hold a two-year-old while Dr. Marcus examines her ears. I skip my lunch break, eating a granola bar in thirty seconds behind the front desk while answering the phone. Dr. Marcus insists I take my mandatory thirty minutes, but I tell him what the health directors don’t know won’t hurt them.

He frowns, but he lets me stay.

He needs the help.

I’m restocking the sticker basket for the third time when the bell above the door chimes.

I look up.

A grown man stands in the doorway, framed by the November dark. He’s tall, wearing a flannel shirt that hangs loose on his frame, and his eyes are wide, glassy, the pupils too large.

He clutches a Spider-Man toy against his chest with both hands, the plastic figure’s legs dangling.

His lower lip trembles.

“Please help me,” he says.

His voice is a child’s. High. Breaking. Terrified.

My medical training kicks in before my fear does. I round the desk slowly, keeping my posture open, my hands visible. “May I help you?”

He stares at me, unblinking. “I’m lost.”

I stop three feet away, close enough to see the sweat on his upper lip, the way his fingers white-knuckle the toy. “Do you know your mommy’s name? Her phone number?”

He shakes his head, and a tear tracks down his cheek. “I can’t remember. Please. I’m scared. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

My mind races through possibilities. Dementia? A dissociative episode? Special needs, like Mary said. He’s fully grown but speaking like a boy of five, and the disconnect is jarring.

I should get Dr. Marcus.

I know I should. But the man is trembling, and I can’t just leave him standing here while the waiting room watches.

“Don’t worry,” I say, keeping my tone steady. “Let me get Dr. Marcus, and we’ll get you some help, okay?”

He nods, a small, frantic bob of his chin. I turn and move quickly toward the back room, my heart hammering against my ribs.

Dr. Marcus is bent over a stack of patient charts, his reading glasses perched on his nose, a cooling coffee cup beside his elbow. “Dr. Marcus,” I whisper, not wanting the man to overhear. “There’s a man out front. I think something is wrong with him. He’s asking for his mommy. He says he’s scared.”

Dr. Marcus straightens, his expression shifting from tired to alert. “Did he tell you his mom’s name?”

“He said he couldn’t remember. I asked for a phone number, but he doesn’t know that either.”

“His name?”

“I didn’t ask. When I realized I couldn’t help him, I came to get you.”

Dr. Marcus sets down his charts. “You said he’s a grown man. Could he be drunk?”

“Maybe. But he’s acting like a child. I thought possibly he had a learning disability and got separated from his caregiver.”

Dr. Marcus hums, a low, thoughtful sound. “Let me take a look.”

I follow him down the hallway, answering his questions in hushed bursts. We round the corner into the front office, and I freeze.

The man is different.

He stands behind the counter with one hand on his hip, the other twirling a strand of his hair around his finger.

The Spider-Man toy is gone.

His posture has shifted hips cocked, chin lifted, eyes narrowed. He looks less afraid and more annoyed, as if he’s been waiting for a table at a restaurant.

A mother in the waiting room gathers her child closer.

Dr. Marcus stops beside me. I can only shrug, because this is not the man I left standing here.

“How can I help you?” Dr. Marcus asks, his voice steady.

The man turns. His mouth twists into a grimace. “Finally. I have been waiting here for the past ten minutes. I demand to see my daughter.”

His voice is entirely different. High-pitched. Girlish. Accusatory.

Dr. Marcus glances back at me, confused, and I shake my head because I have no explanation.

“Your daughter?” Dr. Marcus asks.

“Yes. Emily. I brought her in for a broken arm. She-” The man points an accusing finger at me, his nail polish chipped, pale pink catching the light. “This girl couldn’t tell me anything about my child’s condition, and I demanded to see her.”

I stare at the finger, at the nail polish, at the way his wrist bends when he gestures. My skin prickles.

“I see,” Dr. Marcus says, his tone shifting to something firmer. “I think you have the wrong clinic, ma’am. We do not have a little girl named Emily here.”

“What? You lost my daughter?” The man’s voice climbs to a screech that makes a toddler in the waiting room start crying. “No. This can’t be happening. Someone must have taken her. Please call the police.”

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave before I’m forced to call the cops. You are disturbing the other patients in my waiting room and making my nurses very uncomfortable. Your daughter is not here, and I cannot help you.”

Dr. Marcus steps around the glass partition, his shoulders squared, and points toward the door. “Have a good night, ma’am.”

“You will pay for this,” the man shrieks, his voice cracking into a pitch that makes my teeth ache. He storms toward the door and grabs the handle, yanking it hard.

The door resists the hinges are old, the frame swollen from the cold and when he slams it, the sound is weak, pathetic, a dull thud instead of a bang.

He stands on the sidewalk for a moment, visible through the glass, his hands balled into fists at his sides. Then he turns and disappears into the dark.

The waiting room is silent except for the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the quiet sniffle of the toddler who had started crying.

“Sir?” I turn to Dr. Marcus, my voice unsteady. “That man clearly needed help. Why did you send him away like that?”

Dr. Marcus walks back to the front desk and picks up the phone. “That man has serious psychiatric issues, Harper. We cannot help him here, and people like that are very dangerous to those who do not enter their delusion. I needed him out of here before he snapped and harmed one of the children.” He dials a number and holds the receiver to his ear. “I’m going to call the police and inform them about the man. We still have two more patients to see before we lock up.”

I understand the logic. I do. The children come first. But my chest aches with something heavy and helpless. That man was suffering. He needed help. I just don’t know what kind.

Dr. Marcus finishes his call and we see the remaining patients a girl with an ear infection, a boy with a persistent cough. By the time the last mother bundles her child out the door, the clock reads seven-fifteen.

Dr. Marcus tells me to go home. He’ll finish the charts. I don’t argue. I’m exhausted, my feet throbbing inside my worn nursing shoes, my hands stinging from the sanitizer and the bleach and the cold.

I gather my bag and my coat and push out into the November night.

The parking lot is nearly empty. My black Nissan sits under a streetlight that flickers and buzzes, casting a sickly yellow glow across the asphalt. I dig in my bag for my keys as I walk, my breath clouding in the sharp air.

My car is twenty feet away. Ten. Five.

I click the unlock button. My Nissan chirps.

I reach for the door handle.

A shadow detaches from the space between two parked cars. I catch the movement in my peripheral vision too late. A hand closes around my wrist, the grip warm and dry and impossibly strong.

I spin.

It’s him. The man from the clinic. But his shoulders are back now, his chin lifted, his eyes flat and calm. The wild terror from before is gone. The shrieking mother is gone.

He looks at me like he’s meeting an old friend for coffee.

He smiles, small and easy, and tilts his face up to the dark sky.