Emily had talked about Tessa a lot during the last school year. Emily worried to Priya and Reuben that she identified too closely with Tessa, that there were events in her own past that made her less objective than she might be otherwise, that made it hard for her to separate her personal feelings from Tessa’s story the way she tried to with all of her patients.

“How is she doing?” Reuben asked. They were sitting in his office, which he’d decorated with tapestries on the walls and a big ficus in the corner. He had a couch on one side of the room, where Priya and Emily were sitting, and an armchair opposite it, where he was sitting with his feet up on a coffee table. He’d just gotten a haircut, and his short twists were gone, replaced by a buzz cut. He clearly hadn’t gotten used to it yet, because he kept running his hand over the top of his head.

“She seemed good,” Emily said.

“I’m glad,” Priya answered, leaning forward on the couch, her elbows on her knees. “She had a rough go of it.”

Emily nodded. “I still worry about her.”

Priya smiled. “Of course you do. You worry about all of them.”

Emily laughed. “You know me well.”

“How was it for you?” Priya asked. “Seeing her again.”

Emily thought about it. “I was just relieved she was okay.”

“Because you weren’t,” Priya said, a fact more than a question. “When you were in college.”

“Right,” Emily answered. “I wasn’t.”

Then Reuben started talking about a patient he was worried about, J, who went silent when Reuben asked him about how it felt seeing his brother in rehab.

“I shouldn’t have asked it that way,” Reuben said. “Maybe if I’d phrased it differently, eased into it . . . I know he freezes people out, freezes me out, when things get too hard. I screwed up.”

“You’ve got him talking before,” Priya said. “He trusts you. You’ll have another chance.”

Reuben shook his head. “I’m always afraid that kids like J won’t come back. That this is the week they’ll decide I’m useless. That they’re wasting time sitting here with me when they could be playing video games or hanging out with their friends or whatever.”

The white noise machine hummed quietly in the background.

“I don’t think they come because they feel like time with us is useful or useless,” Emily said, turning to Reuben. “I think sometimes they just need to know there’s someone who cares. Someone who will wait for them to be ready. Someone who will listen when they finally do talk.” She was thinking about her patients, but she was also thinking about her husband. He wasn’t too different from some of these kids. From Reuben’s J. She wondered whether, if she actually was pregnant, her child would be the same way.