A session ends at half past one. The next begins at three. What a therapist's night looks like in the gaps.
Clients see the booking. They rarely think about the night around it — the connective tissue between one hotel door closing softly and another opening. The gaps are part of the work, and how a therapist spends them says a lot about why some people choose the night shift and never give it back.
The first ten minutes after a booking are procedure. Used linens go into the bag's separate compartment, sealed away from the fresh sets. A message to dispatch: finished, available, position. A glance at the night's remaining shape — one more booking, maybe two, the second still unconfirmed and liable to appear from nowhere, because that is how the hours after midnight behave.
Then the city, briefly, belongs to her. Amsterdam between half past one and three is a private show for a small audience: taxi drivers, hotel night porters, the cleaning crews moving through office lobbies in their bright vests, and the bakers — always the bakers, whose ovens start warming around two and whose doorways are the best-smelling places in the city by four. A therapist crossing town between bookings is one of perhaps a few hundred people genuinely at work in the open air, and they nod to each other the way night workers everywhere do.
What she actually does with the hour depends on the season and the woman. In summer, ten minutes on a bench by the Brouwersgracht with the gulls for company. In winter, the corner of a night shop or the lobby café of whatever stays open, with tea and a phone. Something to eat, always — the night shift runs on small meals at strange hours, and the experienced ones never skip them. Some sleep in slices: a twenty-minute reset that the body learns to accept after enough years of nights.
And there is the quiet itself, which more than one of our therapists names as the reason she works these hours at all. The day shift means traffic, crowds, a city performing at full volume. The night means empty bridges, water like glass, and work that arrives in a hush and ends in one. People assume night work is the hard duty someone has to draw. On our roster it is the shift people ask for.
By three she is in another lobby, coat squared, bag on her shoulder, indistinguishable from a guest coming home late. The gap closes. Somewhere across town, the next one has already started counting her twenty minutes.