He had, I understood now, comforted me for a wound he had arranged to have inflicted.

“Someone made you the problem,” Dr.

Cabot said, and there was no drama in it, only a physician’s flat precision, “to protect the actual patient.”

Cormac sat beside me the whole time, his hand resting open on the armrest between us, palm up, never once reaching for me.

He left the choice entirely mine.

And at some point during that appointment — I couldn’t have told you when — I reached over and put my hand in his, and he closed his fingers around it, and neither of us said anything about it, then or after.