“What?” I said. “You mean about, um, brain damage?” Deborah's statement that she wanted to quit was still ringing in my ears, and it was so completely unlike her that I was a little worried, too. The image of vegetable Debbie drooling in a chair while Dexter spoonfed her oatmeal still seemed hauntingly awful to me.

Chutsky shook his head. “Not exactly” he said. “More like psychological damage.”

“How do you mean?”

He made a face. I dunno” he said. “Maybe it's just the trauma.

But she seems ... very weepy. Anxious. Not like, you know. Herself.” I have never been stabbed and then lost most of my blood, and in any case I could not remember reading anything that explained how you are supposed to feel under the circumstances. But it seemed to me that being weepy and anxious when these things happened to you was a relatively reasonable reaction. And before I could think of a tactful way to say so, the elevator doors slid open and Chutsky charged in. I followed.

As the doors slid shut, he went on. “She didn't really know me at first,” he said. “Right when she opened her eyes.”

“I'm sure that's normal” I said, although I was not really sure at all. I mean, she's been in a coma.”

“She looked right at me,” he said, as if I hadn't spoken at all, “and she was like, I dunno. Scared of me. Like, who am I and what am I doing there.”

To be perfectly honest, I had wondered the same thing over the last year or so, but it hardly seemed proper to say so. Instead, I just said, “I'm sure it takes time to—”

“Who am I?” he said, again apparently without noticing that I had spoken. “I sat there the whole time, never left her side for longer than five minutes at a time.” He stared at the elevator's control panel as it chimed to let us know we had arrived. “And she doesn't know who I am.”

The doors slid open, but Chutsky did not notice at first.

“Well” I said, hoping to break him out of his freeze.

He looked up at me. “Let's get a cup of coffee” he said, and headed out the elevator door, pushing past three people in light green scrubs, and I trudged along behind.

Chutsky led me out the door and over to the small restaurant in the ground floor of the parking garage, where somehow he managed to get two cups of coffee rather quickly, without anyone shoving in front of him or elbowing him in the ribs. It made me feel slightly superior: obviously, he was not a Miami native. Still, there was something to be said for results, and I took the coffee and sat at a small table wedged into the corner.

Chutsky didn't look at me, or anything else for that matter.

He didn't blink, and the expression on his face didn't change.