The first night, I didn't sleep. Or rather, I couldn't sleep.
I lay in the pristine white bed, staring at the ceiling, watching shadows from the fjord's reflected moonlight ripple across the concrete like liquid silver. The silence was absolute. No traffic. No neighbors. No hum of a city that never quite slept. Just the occasional whisper of wind against glass and the distant, rhythmic crash of water against stone. It was serene in a way that could have easily induced sleep, but I still could not sleep.
I should have been exhausted. The helicopter ride, the emotional weight of signing the contract, the intensity of meeting Meric Solvang-Lykke—all of it should have knocked me unconscious the moment my head hit the pillow.
Instead, I was wired. Hyperaware. My skin felt too tight, my pulse too fast, my mind too loud.
I kept replaying the handshake. The way his thumb had pressed—deliberately? accidentally?—against the inside of my wrist. The pause before he'd released me. The look in his pale gray eyes that suggested he'd felt exactly what I had: a charge, a recognition, a promise of something neither of us was supposed to want. Stop it, I commanded myself. It was a polite gesture. You are manufacturing data where none exists.
Clause 7.3: The Praxist maintains clinical objectivity. Emotional attachment is prohibited.
I'd asked him what would happen if that rule was broken, and he'd said the contract would be terminated immediately. The methodology would fail.
But he'd also shown me, for just a fraction of a second, that he knew the danger was real. That it had happened before. That it could happen again.
With me? The thought was intoxicating, but I immediately recoiled from it. Or was I projecting that knowledge onto him? It was a therapist's greatest vulnerability: manufacturing a desired response.
I turned onto my side, pulling the covers higher, and my gaze landed on the black binder sitting on the desk. SESSION GUIDELINES. I'd skimmed it earlier—seventy pages of detailed protocols, safety procedures, and technique descriptions. It read like a clinical manual, which I supposed it was. But even through the dry, academic language, I could feel the weight of what I'd agreed to.
Session structures may include physical restraint, sensory deprivation, controlled discomfort, and psychological boundary testing. Clients will be guided to their Edge repeatedly. Resistance is expected and will be documented.
My Edge. The threshold where my control would break.
I threw off the covers and stood, suddenly unable to lie still. The suite's minimalism felt oppressive in the dark—too much empty space, too many clean lines, nowhere to hide from my own thoughts.
I walked to the window.
The fjord stretched black and endless below, the water so still it looked like glass. Across the inlet, mountains rose like sleeping giants, their peaks lost in low-hanging clouds. It was beautiful in a stark, unforgiving way. The kind of beauty that didn't care if you appreciated it or not.
I pressed my palm against the glass. Cold. Solid. Real.
What have I done? I whispered.
The question had haunted me since Vigdis closed the door. Two hundred thousand dollars. Twelve weeks. A contract that stripped away every defense I'd spent my adult life building.
And for what? The possibility of feeling something again?
I turned away from the window and picked up the card from the desk. Meric's handwriting was precise, controlled—exactly what I would have expected.
The first rule of Praxis: You will learn that control is not power. Power is the choice to surrender it.
I read it for the hundredth time, tracing the letters with my fingertip.
He was right, of course. Intellectually, I understood the concept. In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, we call it "acceptance" or "radical acceptance"—the idea that fighting reality often causes more suffering than the reality itself. That sometimes, the most powerful thing you could do was stop resisting.
But knowing something and feeling it were different things.
And I'd spent thirty years perfecting the art of control precisely because I'd seen what happened when you let go. My mother had let go—surrendered to grief after my father's death, disappeared into depression so complete she'd become a ghost in her own house. I'd been twelve, suddenly responsible for everything: bills, groceries, making sure she remembered to eat.
Control had saved me then. Structure. Routine. The belief that if I just managed everything correctly, nothing else would fall apart.
It had worked. I'd gotten scholarships, graduated summa cum laude, and built a thriving practice. I was successful by every metric that mattered.
Except that I felt nothing.
I set the card down and opened the Session Guidelines binder, flipping past the safety protocols to the section labeled "Therapeutic Objectives."
The Praxis methodology operates on the principle that true self-actualization requires dismantling maladaptive control structures. Clients often develop hypervigilance and rigidity as protective mechanisms against past trauma or perceived threats. These mechanisms, while initially adaptive, eventually become prisons.
Through structured surrender experiences, clients learn to differentiate between healthy agency and compulsive control. The goal is not to eliminate autonomy, but to expand it—to give clients the choice to surrender when surrender serves them.
I closed the binder slowly.
He'd read my Client Dossier. He knew about my mother, my childhood, the patterns I'd developed. He knew exactly why I needed this and exactly how to break through it.
The thought should have terrified me.
Instead, it made me feel seen in a way I hadn't been in years.
By the time pale gray light began filtering through the window, I'd given up on sleep entirely. I showered, dressed in the simple clothes I'd packed—black leggings, an oversized sweater—and stood in the middle of my suite, uncertain.
The Protocol had been clear: Clients will have access to common areas during Integration Periods, but movements are restricted to the East Wing unless accompanied by staff.
Integration Period. The forty-eight hours between sessions where I was supposed to process, rest, and prepare for the next psychological excavation.
Forty-eight hours felt like an eternity.
I opened my door carefully, half-expecting an alarm or Vigdis to materialize out of thin air. Neither happened. The corridor was empty, silent, and just as austere as I remembered. Polished concrete, white walls, soft recessed lighting that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
I turned right, following the hallway's gentle curve. The East Wing, according to the map in my welcome packet, housed six client suites, a small library, a meditation room, and a communal dining area. Everything was designed for solitude and introspection.
The library came first. Floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, built-in shelves on the other. The collection was curated—psychology texts, philosophy, and some fiction. I ran my fingers along the spines. Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Fromm's The Art of Loving. Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus.
Of course.
A small table near the window held a carafe of coffee and a single white cup. I poured myself some and settled into one of the leather chairs, staring out at the water.
The coffee was excellent. Dark, strong, perfectly brewed. Everything here was perfect. Controlled. Intentional.
I wondered if Meric had designed the space himself, or if the Institute's aesthetic was something he'd inherited. The welcome packet had mentioned the Institute was fifteen years old, but it didn't say who'd founded it or why. Just that it was "the premiere facility for behavioral psychology and therapeutic power exchange."
Therapeutic power exchange. Such clinical language for what I'd agreed to let him do to me.
I set down the coffee cup and tried to pull out my phone before remembering—
Right. No phone.
I'd surrendered it to Vigdis yesterday. Clause 4.2. No contact with the outside world for twelve weeks. No emails, no texts, no distractions from my patients or colleagues or the carefully constructed life I'd left behind in Boston.
The absence felt like a phantom limb.
I stood abruptly and left the library, suddenly desperate to move, to see more of this place that would be my entire world for the next three months.
The meditation room was next—a small, circular space with cushions on the floor and a wall of textured stone that looked like it had been carved from the cliff itself. Peaceful. Empty. I didn't go in.
The dining area was larger, with several small tables and a serving station that was currently empty. Meals delivered at seven, noon, and six, Vigdis had said. It was barely past six now.
I kept walking.
The corridor curved again, and I found myself facing a set of glass doors marked OBSERVATION WING - AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY.
I stopped.
This was the boundary. The edge of my permitted space.
Through the frosted glass, I could make out the corridor beyond—the one Vigdis had led me through yesterday. The one that housed administrative offices, security operations, and the Praxists' private suites.
Meric's suite was somewhere beyond those doors.
Was he awake? Did he sleep well, or did he lie awake thinking about his clients the way I found myself lying awake thinking about him?
No. That was a projection. He'd made it clear: clinical objectivity. I was a case study, a psychological puzzle to solve. The fact that my pulse had raced when he touched me was data. Nothing more.
I turned away from the doors and nearly collided with someone.