Chapter 5: The Therapy Call
The drizzle needled his scalp, finding paths through his thinning hair. The phone screen was slick in his hand, Dr. Levin’s number a small green rectangle against the dark. He’d stared at it until the digits blurred. A call at 2 a.m. was a scream for help. Was he screaming? He felt silent, emptied out.
He pressed call.
It rang four times. A click, then the smooth, recorded baritone. “You’ve reached the office of Dr. Samuel Levin. Our hours are—”
The beep was a gunshot in the wet quiet.
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Just a ragged intake of air that hitched in his chest. He tried again.
“It’s Robert. Robert Henderson.” His voice was a stranger’s, rusty and thin. “Mary’s husband. We… we met. Once.” He wiped his face, the water and something warmer mixing on his hand. “Something… something happened tonight. My wife. She… there was an event. A party. They made me… I was on a stage. They washed my mouth out. With soap. They… used hairbrushes. On me.”
The words tumbled out, bare and ugly. He wasn’t explaining. He was just cataloging facts for a recording.
“Someone filmed it. It’s online. People are sharing it. My boss knows. I’m at my office. I can’t go home. I don’t know if I have a home.” He sucked in another shaky breath. The confession was a physical purge. “You asked if I deserved it. I don’t know. I just… I endured it. And now it’s everywhere. It’s in my email. It’s on my credit card statement. It’s on my work computer. She thought of everything. She really did.”
He looked up at the buzzing exit sign, its red glow smearing in his vision.
“Is there a way back from this?” The question was a whisper, swallowed by the patter on asphalt. “Or is this just… what I am now? The guy in the dress? Is that it?”
Silence from the phone, just the faint hiss of the recording.
“Sorry for the hour,” he mumbled, and thumbed the end call button.
The finality of it echoed. He had done it. He had spoken the truth into the void. The relief was immediate and infinitesimal, a single grain of sand on a vast, dark beach.
Headlights speared the gloom at the lot’s entrance, washing over the chain-link fence, turning the raindrops into fleeting silver streaks. A dark SUV rolled slowly in, tires hissing on wet pavement. It was Martin’s Lexus.
Robert stood frozen, a animal caught in the open. He could slip back inside, pretend he wasn’t here. But his car was right there. His presence was announced. The Lexus pulled into the reserved spot marked “M. Pryce” and sat idling, exhaust pluming in the cold air. The driver’s door opened.
Martin stepped out. He was in joggers and a rain shell, his thinning hair plastered to his forehead. He hadn’t come from the office. He’d come from home. In his hand, his phone glowed like a tiny beacon. He looked at it, then at the building, then his gaze landed on Robert. He didn’t look surprised.
He pocketed his phone and walked over. The distance closed in a few long strides. Robert could smell the rain on Martin’s shell, see the tired lines around his eyes.
“Robert.”
“Martin. I… couldn’t sleep.”
“Yeah.” Martin’s voice was flat. He looked Robert up and down—the rumpled, ill-fitting spare suit, the wet shoulders, the face that must have looked like a train wreck. “Got your email. Then my wife showed me a text from her book club. Had a video attached.”
Robert’s gut tightened. Of course. Martin’s wife, Cheryl. She was in three different clubs. She’d have seen it within minutes.
“It’s not what it looks like,” Robert said, the lie automatic and pathetic.
“It looks like you were dressed as a maid at a women’s banquet getting your mouth washed out with soap,” Martin said, no inflection. “Is that inaccurate?”
The directness was a slap. Robert looked at the ground, at a puddle reflecting the sickly yellow light. “No.”
“Christ, Robert.” Martin rubbed his forehead. “My phone’s been buzzing for an hour. Not about work. About you. Jim from legal saw it. Sarah in marketing. Do you understand? The ‘Springvale Gossip and Watch’ forum is currently more active than our internal server.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Martin barked a short, humorless laugh. “Sorry is for missing a deadline. Sorry is for spilling coffee on the server. This… this is a biohazard spill. This is a PR crisis for a firm that doesn’t have a PR department because we’re fucking accountants, Robert. We are boring on purpose.”
The rain picked up, a steady, cold drumming on the roofs of the cars.
“It was a private matter,” Robert whispered. “My wife… she—”
“I don’t care.” Martin held up a hand. His patience, always thin, was gone. “I don’t care about your marital problems. I care that the word ‘Henderson & Pryce’ is now in the comments section of a viral humiliation video. I care that clients are going to Google us on Monday and that’s going to pop up. ‘Is that the perv firm?’ That’s the chatter. That’s the brand now.”
Each word was a nail. Robert felt himself being boxed in, a different kind of stage being built around him.
“What do you want me to do?” Robert asked.
“I want you to fix it. But you can’t fix the internet.” Martin sighed, a long, weary sound. “Look. You’re a good accountant. You are. Or you were. But this… this is a liability I cannot absorb. The partners…”
“There are no other partners. It’s just you and me.”
“It’s my name on the door!” Martin’s control snapped, his voice sharp in the wet night. “Mine! I built this from a fucking shoebox in my den! And you just… you just lit a match to it. For what? Some weird sex thing?”
“It wasn’t a sex thing!” The protest erupted from him, louder than he intended. It echoed off the office wall. “It was a punishment. It was… it was supposed to be private.”
“Well, it’s not private anymore.” Martin’s phone buzzed again. He glanced at it, his expression hardening further. “Cheryl says the video’s on TikTok now. With a catchy song. It has half a million views.”
The number was abstract, monstrous. Half a million. Robert’s knees felt weak. He leaned against the cold, wet metal of his sedan.
“You need to go home, Robert. Or don’t go home. I don’t care. But you can’t be here on Monday.”
The sentence hung in the air between them, as real and solid as the rain.
“You’re firing me.”
“I’m asking you to take a voluntary leave of absence. Indefinite. While we… assess the firm’s position.”
“You’re firing me,” Robert repeated, the numbness spreading.
“If you walk in that door on Monday, I will have no choice but to terminate you for gross misconduct and bringing the firm into disrepute. This way… this way it’s cleaner. You resign for personal reasons. We issue a bland statement. You keep some dignity.”
Dignity. The word was so ludicrous Robert almost laughed. He had none. He was a man who paid for his own public flogging.
Martin looked at him, and for a second, something flickered in his eyes—not pity, but a kind of horrified recognition. The recognition of how fast a life can unravel. It was gone in an instant, replaced by pragmatic frost.
“Clean out your desk. Use your keycard before six a.m. Sunday. The system deactivates it then. I’ve already revoked your remote access.”
The infrastructure. Always the infrastructure. Mary had locked him out of his home. Martin was locking him out of his work.
“What am I supposed to do?” Robert asked, the question hollow.
“That’s not my problem anymore.” Martin turned back toward his Lexus. He paused, hand on the door handle. “For what it’s worth… I liked you, Robert. I thought you were a decent guy. This is just business.”
He got in. The engine purred. The headlights reversed, sweeping over Robert one last time, carving his shape out of the dark before turning away. The Lexus moved through the puddles and out of the lot, its taillights dissolving into the grey downpour.
Robert stood alone. The water soaked through his jacket, through his shirt. The chafing of the wool pants was a distant, hot irritation beneath the deeper, colder chill.
His phone vibrated in his hand. Not a call. A text. He looked down, expecting another link, another headline.
It was from Ava.
Just three words.
Ava: Dad, are you okay?
He stared at them. His daughter. She’d seen it. Of course she’d seen it. Her friends would have sent it to her. Her world was digital; this would have flooded her feeds within minutes. Her father, gagging on soap. Her father, in a dress.
The simple, human concern in the message was a weight he couldn’t bear. It was the first thing that had breached the walls of his punishment that wasn’t part of the punishment itself. It was just love, confused and scared.
He couldn’t answer it. What could he say? No. Telling her no would make it real in a new way. It would make her share the burden.
He slid the phone into his pocket, unanswered. He turned and looked at the dark office building. His keycard would work for a little over a day. He had a desk to clean out.