He smiles crookedly. “Oh, you mean like here?”
“Nothing like here.” I shoot him a look. “Anyway, they were drinking quite a lot and smoking pot, so their guard was down when a crazy man with a butcher knife burst into the cabin.” I lick my lips, recalling the description I wrote in the book. “He slashed their tires so they couldn’t get away. Then he stabbed all four of them, leaving them for dead. My patient survived by pretending to be unconscious—after the assailant left the cabin, she stumbled through the woods until she came across the main road and flagged down a car for help.”
“Jesus,” Luke breathes. “That’s… awful.”
I pull the book out of his hands, flipping through the pages of my own words, recounting the story my patient told me of the horrors she had endured. “The worst part is they never caught the guy who did it. He’s still out there somewhere.”
“Oh, wow.” He shakes his head. “They never found him? Do they know why he did it?”
“Does anyone know why somebody would try to murder four random people in the woods?”
Luke doesn’t have an answer for that.
“For a year, she woke up screaming every night.” I can still picture that girl’s bloodshot eyes with the dark circles underneath. “She had nightmares about the man being outside her window. It tortured her that he was still out there. It took a lot of counseling to get her better. Counseling and time.”
“I’m sure your help was a large part of that.”
“I’d like to think I helped her. It’s hard to get over that kind of trauma.”
“On that note…” He jerks his head in the direction of the living room. “Let me introduce you to your new security system.”
For the next half hour, Luke shows me all the hard work he put in to secure my home. There are sensors mounted on all the first floor windows. The control panel is right inside the front door, and he turns away to allow me to punch in my six-digit passcode. It’s my late mother’s birthday.
“You can arm or disarm your security system once you punch in the code,” he explains. “This control panel will even allow you to set up a schedule to disarm it at certain times of day if that’s what you want.”
“What about the camera?”
“I mounted it outside your front door. I just need to link the feed to your phone.” He holds out his hand. “If you give me your phone, I’ll set it all up for you.”
I left my phone back in my office, so I lead him over there. As soon as he gets my phone in his hands, he quickly installs the app I need and links it to the camera. When he hands it back to me, I can see the image on the screen of the area outside my front door.
“This is incredible,” I breathe. “Thank you so much.”
But Luke doesn’t answer me. He’s staring straight ahead, at the bookcase in my office. His eyes are locked on a gap between two books. “What’s that?”
In all my years of interviewing patients in this office, he is the first person to notice the tape recorder concealed between those two hardcover books. I feel a surge of annoyance mingled with respect. “It’s a tape recorder.”
“A tape recorder?”
“I record my patient interviews.”
Luke’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “All of them?”
“Yes.” I shrug like it’s no big deal. In New York, it’s not illegal to record a conversation that you are a part of, even if the other person is not aware of it. “I don’t do anything with the recordings besides remind myself of the last visit if I need to. I use them in place of notes. I don’t have an electronic medical record in my home.”
I watch Luke’s expression. I brace myself for him to tell me what I’m doing is terribly wrong or threaten to inform my patients about this breach of confidentiality. But when he finally speaks, what he says shocks me. “You shouldn’t use tapes. You should record them digitally.”
“Digitally?”
“Yeah.” He shakes his head. “I mean, you must have thousands of these tapes. Wouldn’t it be better if you saved everything onto your computer?”
“I like tapes.”
“Tapes? Come on. Did I step into a time machine and get magically transported to the eighties?”
The dopey grin on his face makes me smile back. When I first met Luke at the clinic, I found him mildly annoying, even though he was good at what he did. But he’s growing on me.