Turn 6 · Practice Partner

You move before the sentence ends. Your hand closes around the phone and the voice cuts off mid-word — *a-* — and you're up off the sofa, and Rae is saying something behind you, and you're already at the door. Your feet know the route. Down the hall, up the stairs, two flights, and the whole time your chest is tight with something that isn't fear exactly, more like the feeling of yanking a leash out of someone's hand before they've finished pulling. Your phone is warm in your grip, screen still glowing, the waveform of Module Four frozen where you stopped it.

You don't go inside your flat. You stand on the landing with your key in the lock and your hand won't turn it. Not won't — doesn't. The key sits in the cylinder and your wrist stays where it is, and you watch your own hand with the same detached attention you'd give to a clock that's stopped at the wrong time. After a long moment you pull the key out and press your back against the wall and breathe. The stairwell smells like concrete and the neighbour's laundry detergent and something faintly metallic, and you stand there and you are not calm. That fact is remarkable. You are not calm and it feels like surfacing, like breaking through something you didn't know you were under.

The phone buzzes in your hand. A notification from the course forum — a new reply in a thread you don't remember subscribing to. And below it, another email from the same address, same sender, no subject line this time. You don't open either one. You stand on the landing and your key won't turn and your hands are shaking and the waveform on the screen is paused at a point where the voice is only halfway through a word, and you think: it said *alone*, and I am alone, and that is not what I wanted to be.

Downstairs, you hear Rae's door open. Footsteps in the hall. She's coming up.