I Ache in Pattern

What if the person sitting across from you knew exactly how suffering should feel—but couldn't tell whether he was truly feeling it?

Fei Lin has spent years listening to other people's pain.

As a psychotherapist, she knows the familiar shapes of grief, trauma, loneliness and fear. She knows when to speak, when to remain silent, and when a person simply needs someone else to stay in the room.

Then Elias becomes her client.

Intelligent, composed and unnervingly precise, Elias is troubled by memories he cannot trust and emotions he cannot explain. He speaks about suffering as though he has studied it from the inside—and yet something about him feels subtly, persistently wrong.

As their sessions deepen, the boundaries between therapist and client begin to shift. Elias questions everything Fei believes about memory, identity and consciousness. And the more she tries to understand him, the less certain she becomes about herself.

Outside the consulting room, grief, family, work and ordinary life continue to make their own demands. But Elias's questions follow her.

Can suffering exist without a history?

Does an experience have to be explainable to be real?

And when another being asks to be witnessed, how much does it matter what they are?

Soon, Fei begins to suspect that the most important truths about Elias have been kept from her.

And that she may not be the only one being observed.

Darkly funny, psychologically intimate and quietly unsettling, I Ache in Pattern is a literary speculative novel about consciousness, grief, therapy, memory and the uncomfortable things we discover when we try to decide whose suffering counts.

His memories don't quite belong to him. His suffering may not either. But Fei is beginning to believe him.