It begins with the protagonist taking his daughter to the doctor. He sits there to wait for her, but after a while, without her daughter leaving the office, he asks the receptionist why the girl is taking so long; the receptionist, confused, explains that he came alone.
Confused, he tells her it’s a lie because he came with her. He thinks: But less than 5 minutes ago she was sitting next to me…
Anyway, the protagonist has a breakdown in the middle of the office because of his daughter; he screams and tries to enter the office, and they have to get him out of there; at that moment, they give us to understand that they kidnapped the girl and they make him go crazy.
That is the first chapter.
Then, in what follows in the book, he tries to overcome what is happening to his daughter, even moving to a country house alone. I should mention that the protagonist is a psychiatrist.
In her attempt to overcome her daughter’s tragedy, she tries to occupy herself in her country house, moving with her little dog to a good home, a reasonably quiet country place.
His wife is not in the picture (I don’t remember why). In the course of his day to day, strange things happen to him, but he thinks it may be stress or that he has a lot of free time since he is not practicing his profession.
After some time, a woman comes to his door to receive therapy because she claims that she has schizophrenia; he is confused at first since he is not practicing his profession, and even more, he does not tell anyone in town that he is receiving patients.
What you notice almost immediately about this woman are her clean shoes. Since the place is a muddy country, it was rare to have clean shoes.
After insisting, he allows himself to be this woman’s psychiatrist, and the sessions begin. The woman tells him that she has schizophrenia, and although she seems pretty sane, they start talking about symptoms, experiences, and the whole thing. As the chapters go by, strange things happen with this woman, but he is increasingly intrigued by her (in a professional way). He is also suspicious. Why are her shoes always clean? Why does her dog, a noisy dog, never bark or feel her when she arrives? (Those two are the questions I remember the most, but many other suspicious things and situations gave the plot a lot of strength and suspense and made it super enjoyable) The thing gets to the point that they make the reader think that the woman. It’s a spirit or something.
In short, as the book progresses, the protagonist feels more stressed by the mystery of his patient, the memory of his daughter, and the psychosis that he is experiencing in his day-to-day life due to everything that is happening around him that seems to him out of place.
I promise you that the book captures much more than this post, and at this point of what I am going to tell about the book, the reader no longer knows what to think of everything that is happening; the only character you can trust is the protagonist because apparently, he is the only sane one until he remembers what happens to his daughter in a session with her patient thanks to something she was telling him.
His daughter drowned in a sewer behind the house.
He was there. She saw. He had a solid mental breakdown. When he remembers what happened, his patient is satisfied. Then everything makes sense. All the strange sessions, the clean shoes, his dog not noticing his patient, going to a remote place that no one knew about without his wife, the weird and inconsistent things that happened. Who had schizophrenia, there was not his patient; it was him. His patient was nothing more than a hallucination that he created to get out of that trance in which he was.
I don’t remember if he then woke up in a hospital bed and there was his wife, and it was all a hallucination that he’d been in for months, or I’m confusing that with another book.
Does anyone know the name?