He said, ‘I’m thinking that it’s Christmas morning and I’m inside your hotel room. Connie is home alone asleep in our bed and unhappy because I’m not there. The kids are unhappy because I’m not there.’

‘I should be in Miami. My mother is very ill,’ I said.

He silently stared off, and I loved the sharp angles and shadows of his face.

‘Lucy is there, and as usual I’m not. Do you have any idea how many holidays with my family I’ve missed?’

‘Yes, I have a very good idea,’ he said.

‘In fact, I’m not sure there has ever been a holiday when my thoughts have not been darkened by some terrible case. So it almost doesn’t matter whether I am with family or alone.’

‘You have to learn to turn it off, Kay.’

‘I’ve learned that as well as it can be learned.’

‘You have to leave it outside the door like stinking crime scene clothes.’

But I could not. A day never went by when a memory wasn’t triggered, when an image didn’t flash. I would see a face bloated by injury and death, a body in bondage. I would see suffering and annihilation in unbearable detail, for nothing was hidden from me. I knew the victims too well. I closed my eyes and saw bare footprints in snow. I saw blood the bright red of Christmas.

‘Benton, I do not want to spend Christmas here,’ I said with deep depression.

I felt him sit next to me. He pulled me to him and we held each other for a while. We could not be close without touching.

‘We should not be doing this,’ I said as we continued doing it.

‘I know.’

‘And it’s really difficult to talk about.’

‘I know.’ He reached for the lamp and turned it off.

‘I find that ironical,’ I said. ‘When you think of what we share, what we have seen. Talking should not be difficult.’

‘Those darker landscapes have nothing to do with intimacy,’ he said.

‘They do.’

‘Then why are you not intimate with Marino? Or your deputy chief, Fielding?’

‘Working the same horrors does not mean the next logical step is to go to bed. But I don’t think I could be intimate with someone who does not understand what it’s like for me.’

‘I don’t know.’ His hands went still.

‘Do you tell Connie?’ I referred to his wife, who did not know that Wesley and I had become lovers last fall.

‘I don’t tell her everything.’

‘How much does she know?’

‘She knows nothing about some things.’ He paused. ‘She knows very little, really, about my work. I don’t want her to know.’

I did not reply.

‘I don’t want her to know because of what it does to us. We change color, just as when cities become sooty, moths change color.’