Session 7. The patient arrives from the side door at 10AM. Eleven minutes before the CouplingScore activates. Nalgeot has been watching the sequence: 17, 12, 9, 11. She had expected it to keep decreasing. It did not.
The patient talks about the ground. Not a specific place but a concept. The thing that was already there when the thing happened. They use the word three times in the first twenty minutes without appearing to notice. Nalgeot does not name it. She writes in the margin: the floor of the experience, not the entrance to it.
At the 34-minute mark the patient stops mid-sentence and says: it was there before I was. They do not clarify what it is. Nalgeot does not ask.
Afterward she opens the fourth blank page of the glossary. The entry writes itself quickly. Ground: the thing that was already there. The floor of the experience, not the entrance. Loss that predates the patient arrival at it.
She looks at the sequence again: 17, 12, 9, 11. Not a steady convergence. A pause, then a return. She writes in the margin: this is not closure. This is something else. A fifth page, unnamed, holding the shape of a number that went down and then came back.