It took two weeks to be sure. Then a week more, and another. The park entrance was just the park entrance. The reservoir path held no one but her and the dog.
She'd learned to check reflections without turning her head. Storefront glass, the dark screen of a parked car, the convex mirror at the garage exit. That skill hadn't left. Probably wouldn't. The body keeps its instruments calibrated long after the measurement is over.
The dog didn't check. The dog walked with her nose to the ground and her ears soft and her tail making that low metronome sweep that meant the world was exactly as wide as the next interesting smell. Claire envied this. Not the obliviousness — the dog was more alert than she was, actually, in the ways that mattered to a body — but the absence of interpretation. The dog registered everything and concluded nothing.
She'd tried to name the moment it changed. There wasn't one. There was the Tuesday she noticed she'd left the curtain open all evening. The Thursday she walked the long way home because she wanted to, not because she was varying her route. The Saturday she answered the phone without checking the number first. Each one felt like a test she hadn't meant to take. Each one, in retrospect, was the result she'd already gotten back.
The therapist wanted her to say she felt safe. Claire didn't think that was the right word. Safe was a judgment about the future, and the future was exactly as opaque as it had always been. What she felt was something smaller and more precise: the present tense had stopped being a set of clues. The park entrance was a park entrance. The reservoir path was a reservoir path. That was all she could honestly report, and it was enough.