They were not company.

I knew it even as I told myself the lie, the way you know a thing in the part of your mind you keep the lights off in.

A specialist is a transaction with a white coat on it; he comes, he assesses, he adjusts, he bills, he leaves.

He is no more company to a frightened woman than the thermostat on the wall.

But the lie was convenient, and convenience had been the organizing principle of my attention for years, and so I let it stand, and went to my meetings, and left my mother to the thermostats.