“Alex, when we started out, there was this rush of feeling every time I saw you. All I had to do was hear your voice and this sympathetic nervous system thing kicked in— this incredible flood of emotion. Sometimes when the doorbell rang and I knew it was you there’d be this heat— like a hot flash. I started to worry I was going through early menopause.” She looked into her Irish coffee. “Sometimes I’d get sopping wet. That was something.”

I touched her hand. Cool.

She said, “Maybe we just had some kind of hormonal thing going on and it faded. Maybe every damn thing boils down to hormones and we’re in the wrong damn field.”

She turned away. Grabbed for her purse, fumbled for a tissue, and poked at her eyes. “One drink and my filter goes bye-bye.”

Her mouth set in a way that thinned her lips. “I’ll probably regret saying this but what really bothered me when I felt things diminishing was that it wasn’t that way with Grant.”

Her dead husband. Wharton grad, rich kid, successful financial type. He’d succumbed young to a freakishly rare cancer. Even when Allison loved me she’d talked about him adoringly.

“You had something great with him,” I said.

“You weren’t a replacement, Alex. I swear.”

“Worse things to be.”

“Don’t be noble,” she said. “It makes me feel worse.”

I said nothing.

She said, “I just lied big time. It did fade with Grant. After I buried him he stopped being physical to me and turned into a...a...wraith. I felt— still feel guilty about that.”

I groped for a reply. Every option sounded like shrinky cant. Coming here had been a mistake.

Suddenly, Allison’s hip was touching mine and she was taking my face in her hands, kissing me hard. She retreated, ended up even farther down the booth.

We sat there.

“Alex, what I felt about you in the beginning was every bit as intense as with Grant. More intense on the physical level. Which also made me feel guilty. I started to think about us in a long-term sense. Wondering what it would be like. Then we had that problem on the Malley case and things just started to change. I know that alone couldn’t have done it, there must’ve been...oh, listen to me, I sound like every other talky broad...it’s confusing. The work stuff was part of what turned me on, and then all of a sudden it repulsed me.”

The Malley case was the eight-year-old child murder. One of Allison’s patients— a fragile young woman— had been drawn in. I’d deceived her. All in the name of truth, justice...

Robin had never liked hearing about the work stuff. Allison had chased gory details with a vengeance.

I said, “Things change.”