Renata picked her keys up off the reception counter. The jingle went through the empty office like something dropped down a well, and Tyler flinched at it, and she didn't look back to see him flinch. She just walked.

He followed her. He wanted to say he decided to — that would have been a lie he could live with, maybe, later. His feet had already done it before the rest of him caught up, socks sliding on the linoleum, and by the time he thought the word no he was already past the counter, past the little sign that said PLEASE TURN OFF CELL PHONES, past the dead fish tank humming its one long note. His shirt was on her back. His keys were gone. His car sat locked in the lot behind him and there was nowhere on the other side of that door he could get to anyway, so the walking wasn't a choice so much as a fact he was inside of.

The hall narrowed. That was the first thing. The reception area was wide and bright and had a couch and a coffee table with magazines from two summers ago, and the hall was just a throat — one person wide, walls close enough that his shoulder brushed the frame of a dark doorway on the left, the room with the sink, where the light was off and something metal caught a thread of yellow from the back and held it. The smell changed as they went. Up front it was all antiseptic, the clean sting of it, the smell of a place that wanted you to believe it was a place. Ten feet down the hall the latex came in under it, and under that something older, something that had soaked into the drywall a long time ago and never come out, sweet and low and wrong, like the bottom of a cooler left in the sun.

Renata's ponytail swung with her hips. She didn't hurry. She walked the way you walk to your own kitchen, and the keys hung off one finger and clicked against her thigh, and Tyler watched the back of his own shirt move on her shoulders and felt the cold come up through his socks from the floor.

The door to the back room stood open. The light inside was yellow, a single bulb in a bare socket, and it didn't reach the hall so much as spill, a cone of it lying on the floor across the threshold like something poured. He stopped at the edge of it. She didn't. She walked in and the light took her and she turned around inside it and looked at him standing in the dark of the hall with his arms crossed over his bare chest.

"Come on," she said.

The room was small. That was the thing he kept coming back to. It was small and warm — warmer than the hall, warmer than the front office, warm like somebody had been in here with the door shut — and the bulb buzzed up in its socket, a thin electric drone that got into the back of his teeth. There was a counter along one wall with a sink in it and a stainless tray laid out on a folded blue cloth, and on the tray the instruments lay in a row, clean, in order, the way he'd seen them Tuesday. There was a cabinet above the counter, closed. There was a rolling stool. There was a trash can with a lid, and the lid was on.

And there was the chair.

It sat in the middle of the room under the cone of the light like it had been put there on purpose, which of course it had, which was the part he didn't let himself finish thinking. It was a dental chair, the same kind he'd sat in Tuesday, the same kind he'd woken up in with a pick laid on his chest — but it was older, and it was different. The upholstery was cracked along the seams and gone dark in the cracks. The brackets on the sides of it weren't the little plastic clip-ons for a spit cup. They were steel, and they were bolted through the frame, four of them, two at the shoulders and two lower down where a person's wrists would fall if their arms were down at their sides. The headrest was set too high. It was set too high for anybody sitting in it, and Tyler stood there in his socks and looked at that and understood, in a way he didn't put into words, that the headrest wasn't set for the person in the chair.

Near the base, where the frame met the floor, the vinyl had a stain on it. It was dark and it was old and it had run down from the seat in a way that a spill wouldn't. He'd seen it Tuesday. He hadn't let himself think about it Tuesday.

"Sit," Renata said. She patted the seat twice with the flat of her hand. The sound was small and dead in the little room, no echo, just a flat slap against old vinyl, and then the buzz of the bulb came back in behind it.

"Renata—"

"Sit down, honey."

He sat. He didn't know how to explain it to himself afterward, and he would try, in the days that came after, lying awake, but in the moment it was simple: she said it, and his body did it, the way his body had done everything she and the doctor had told it to do since Tuesday. The vinyl was warm. That was the first thing he noticed, that the seat was warm, warm like somebody had been sitting in it, and he sat down into that warmth and it came up through his jeans and he hated it and he stayed.

The chair was angled back a little. Not flat, not all the way, but enough that his weight settled into the curve of it and his feet came up off the floor a half inch, and he had to plant them to keep from sliding. The headrest was behind his head but too high, so the back of his skull rested on the top edge of the seat instead, and it pushed his chin down toward his chest. He looked up at her from under his own brow. The light was behind her head. He couldn't see her face right.

She leaned over him. The shirt — his shirt — hung off her shoulders and the collar gaped and he could see the freckles across her chest and the thin silver chain of her necklace lying in the hollow of her throat, and she smelled like mint and under the mint like something sweeter, and she reached past his face to the bracket at his left shoulder. He heard the buckle before he felt anything. A click. Then the strap came across him.

It went across his chest, high, just under his collarbones, and it pulled snug and stopped. Not tight. That was the thing. It wasn't tight. He could breathe all the way in if he wanted to. He tested it without meaning to — drew a breath, felt the strap come up against his chest and hold there, and the breath went in anyway and the strap just sat on him, patient, the way a hand sits on a dog's back when it's already decided not to move. He could have gotten out of it. He was almost sure he could have gotten out of it, if he'd wanted to, if he'd tried, if he'd leaned forward and pushed and worked his shoulders — and that was worse, somehow, that it wasn't tight. That it didn't have to be.

She did the right one too. Click. The second strap came across and met the first and the two of them lay on his chest like a belt laid over him, and she stood back and looked at her work with her head tilted, and the bulb buzzed, and Tyler sat in the warm chair with his bare chest strapped and his socks up off the floor and did not move.

"There," she said. She pushed a strand of hair back behind her ear with one finger. The keys were still hanging off her other hand. "That's better, isn't it."

"What is this," Tyler said. His voice came out smaller than he wanted. It came out like a kid's voice, and he heard it come out like that, and his face went hot.

"It's a chair."

"Renata."

"It's a chair, Tyler." She walked around behind him. He heard her shoes on the floor, felt the air move where she passed, and then she was at his shoulder on the other side and he couldn't see her without turning his head and the headrest was in the way of turning his head. "It's a chair and you're in it and you're fine."

He was fine. His hands were on the arms of the chair and his fingers had found the ends of the armrests and curled around them without his permission, and he made them let go, one at a time, and laid them flat, and the flat of his palms was sweating against the vinyl. He could hear his own breathing. It wasn't loud. It was just there, the way it gets when you're the only one making noise in a room.

She came back around into the light and stood in front of him and looked down. From this angle he could see her face now, the green of her eyes gone dark in the low light, the dimples at the corners of her mouth even though she wasn't smiling, the freckles across her nose. She looked at him the way she'd looked at him across the chair Tuesday, warm and easy, like a woman about to ask about his dog.

"Do you want to know what the drill was for," she said.

It wasn't a question the way she said it. It had a question's shape and it landed like a door closing, and Tyler's mouth was already open to answer and there was no answer in it. The drill. The sound he'd heard at 6:48 in the morning, coming from back here, from this room, from this little warm room with the tray and the chair and the stain — and she'd stood in the doorway up front with the drill in her hand and told him she wasn't running it, and he hadn't asked, and now she was asking for him.

He didn't say anything. The straps lay across his chest and his palms lay flat on the vinyl and the bulb buzzed and somewhere past the sink, in the dark room down the hall, a shadow moved across the open doorway.

He saw it. He was looking past her shoulder when it happened, past the counter, out the open door into the black of the hall, and there was the doorway of the room with the sink, and the light from this room lay on the floor out there and did not reach into that doorway, and something crossed it. Something moved through the strip of dark where the doorway was. It was slow. It was the size of a person. It went from one side of the doorway to the other and then it stopped, and the stopped shape stood in the dark just past the sink and did not come in and did not go away.

Tyler's eyes came back to Renata. She was watching him. She'd watched him see it. She hadn't turned around to look, not once, and that told him everything he was not going to let himself finish knowing — that she knew what was in the dark room, that she'd known it was there the whole time, that it had been there when she walked him down the hall and it had been there when she strapped him in.

"Tyler," she said.

He looked at her.

"Do you want to know," she said, "what the drill was for."

The room went quiet. The bulb buzzed and the fish tank hummed somewhere up front and his own breath moved the strap across his chest, and in the dark past the sink the shape stood still in the doorway and waited, and Tyler Brennan sat in the warm chair with his hands flat and his chin down and his mouth open, and did not answer.