She fooled with her hair. A strand broke off and floated to her knee. She tweezed it between thumb and forefinger, tried to deposit it in the wastebasket. The hair adhered to her fingertip. She rubbed until it dropped. That took a while.

“As you can see, I’m a little compulsive.”

I smiled.

She smiled back. Hard to read the emotion behind it. By comparison, Mona Lisa was blatant.

“Okay,” she said, “the thing with therapy is to be utterly honest, right?”

“As honest as you feel you can be.”

“There are degrees of honesty?”

“There are degrees of revelation,” I said. “It’s a matter of what you’re comfortable with.”

“Ah,” she said. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. In the end, we’re all strangers except to ourselves, that’s why your job is so interesting, you try to … span the gap.” Head shake. “That probably didn’t make sense.”

“It made perfect sense.”

Her eyes drifted back to the paper on my wall. Blanche snuggled closer. “Never had a pet. Don’t know exactly why.”

“Four kids,” I said, “I’d imagine you’re pretty busy.”

“I mean even as a child. I could’ve had a pet if I asked. I could’ve had anything. But I never asked.”

She blinked. “Okay, time for that honesty: The reason the appointment was canceled wasn’t because I was urged to see someone else. It was because of you specifically. The other work you do. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Police cases.”

“Exactly. Someone thought it would be a bad idea for someone like me to get involved with a doctor who did that. No one close to me, just a suit—a person paid to be careful.”

A beat. “But here I am, after all. Which leads me to a second bit of honesty, Dr. Delaware. I suspected you were following us the moment you turned off Coldwater onto Beverly.”

I took a second to digest that. “You suspected but you didn’t sound an alarm.”

“If it was me alone, I’d probably have turned around and gotten the heck out of there. But with the tribe, a trip that had been planned for a long time? I suspected but I didn’t know for sure, so no sense scaring them, ruining their day. So I waited to see what you did once you entered the park and you just walked your dog and ignored us and I figured I was wrong, you were just a guy with a dog. Then we met up by the pond and you cleverly ignored me but made sure I’d see that magazine. Even then, I didn’t think much of it. Then I read your card and I remembered your name. Remembered that other work you do and started to wonder.”

She twisted a thicker clump of hair. Several more strands fell to her lap. She made no attempt to clear them.