Panic did to me what panic had always done.

It made me cruel, and it made me stupid, and it made me look for someone to blame that was not myself.

I stood and rounded on Lucy and seized her by the arm.

“What did you do to him?” I shouted.

“Why is he living in a hovel?

What did you do?”

She pulled her arm free of my grip — not violently, just firmly, the way you remove yourself from something unclean — and she crossed to a rusted drawer, took out a stack of medical papers, and dropped them onto the small wooden table between us.

“You still point fingers,” she said, “before you ask a single question.