What’s more, I liked her. I trusted her.

And I took 26 different medications while under her care. I didn’t behave as expected when I took them; nothing seemed to “fix” me—so she switched one for another, over and over again. Often, I’d be the one to ask for another option. I was sensitive to everything and didn’t like the side effects, of which there were many. Lithium made me nauseated and didn’t seem to alleviate much of anything. Perphenazine made me chew my tongue ragged, and the antipsychotics all made me feel crazier than I was before I began taking medication at all, locked in a swimmy, cotton-brained confusion. When I tried to talk to her about it, she seemed distant. You’ll adjust, she explained. But I didn’t.

More than anything, I was bad at describing what was happening to me. Newly adult and expected to shop for my own groceries, I struggled with the noise and the color in the grocery store and what to buy once inside. Frequently, I came back with the wrong things, or nothing at all. I didn’t have an eating disorder; I’d just get inside the grocery store and my stomach would flip-flop at the low drone of fluorescent lights, the intensity of the citrus display. And food frequently changed locations within the store. If they moved something from an endcap display where I’d found it the week before, it would take me hours to find it again. I’d wander the aisles in a daze, hoping to get something to eat. For weeks I lived on grape juice and Triscuits, or bananas, or string cheese, or prepackaged lunchmeat. I knew how to cook. I was an excellent cook, had worked as a pastry chef’s assistant during high school. But grocery shopping was a baffling, dizzying experience, so I avoided it whenever possible. Now, my fiancé does the grocery shopping. I cook now, flatten garlic with the side of a knife, grow basil in pots by the back steps to make into pesto, deglaze our saucepans with white wine.

But then, I drove. It had taken me a long time to learn, and I wanted to make up for it by driving as much as possible. I cast loops around town, putting thousands of miles on my car without ever leaving the state. And with little to do between occasional school attendance, feeding horses, and attending medication-management appointments, as Karen called them, I found myself driving on the main road by her house. Or her old house, as by then, she’d started the process of getting divorced from her husband and had all but moved in with another psychiatrist in her office. I saw them at my early morning appointments, looking guilty and freshly showered. Just one car parked behind their office, I noticed. So I memorized her car, his truck, her ex-husband’s car. Then I started driving near the new house.

When they bought that house, I knew almost immediately how much they paid for it through public records online. When the house went on the market, later, I clicked through the pictures, fascinated by the colors: a blue bathroom, a cantaloupe kitchen, the forest-green dining room. I scrolled through the pages on the ad, trying to justify her choices. I worked as a real-estate assistant, too, so I rationalized away the experience of looking up Karen’s information. And, because I worked in the same office as her listing agent and my boss had another listing across the street, I got to hear feedback, juicy tidbits on the colors, from those who had shown the listing, even going so far as to tell Karen, though I never told her I knew it was her house. I was a knitter and made quilts. I fantasized about how it would have been if we had met under other circumstances, like in a quilter’s group.