She'd allowed her voice to climb. The man at the next table looked up from his cappuccino. Jean smiled at him, picked up her napkin, and wiped her face.

I scanned the notes again. Yeah, therapy! Rah rah!

She held out her hand. “I need them back.”

I gave her the papers and she slipped them back in the envelope.

I said, “What are you going to do with them?”

“Destroy them. Can you just imagine what the media would do with it? Blaming Becky, turning the whole thing into something sleazy? Please, Alex, keep it to yourself. I don't want to see Becky victimized a second time.” She flipped her hair again. “Also, to be perfectly honest, I don't want to be blamed for not supervising her.”

“It took guts for you to show it to me,” I said.

“Guts?” She laughed softly. “Stupidity, maybe, but for some reason I trust you—I don't even know why I did show it to you—getting it off my chest, I guess.”

She put the envelope in her purse and shook her head again.

“How could she have let it happen? She talks about him trying to touch her and kiss her, but what I got between the lines was her developing some sort of feelings for him. All that p-cing, as if it was a cute little game. Don't you agree?”

“Fondness for him definitely comes across,” I said. “Whether or not it was sexual, I don't know.”

“Even if it was plain affection, it was irrational. The man was psychotic, couldn't even keep himself clean. And this G person she keeps mentioning, I still have no idea who that is. Probably Hewitt's girlfriend—some other psychotic he met on the street and dragged in with him. Becky was getting herself involved in a love triangle with psychotics, for God's sake. How could she? She was naive, but she was bright—how could she have shown such poor judgment?”

“She probably didn't think she was doing anything wrong, Jean. Otherwise, why would she have kept notes?”

“But if she thought what she was doing was okay, why not keep those notes right in Hewitt's chart?”

“Good point,” I said.

“It's a mess. I should have supervised her more closely. I should have been more in touch. . . . I just can't understand how she could have let him get that close to her.”

“Countertransference,” I said. “Happens all the time.”

“With someone like that?”

“Prison therapists get attached to convicts. Who knows what causes attraction?”

“I should have known.”

“No sense blaming yourself. No matter how closely you supervise someone, you can't be with them twenty-four hours a day. She was trained, Jean. It was up to her to tell you.”