“Of course, being careful, taking it easy, those are concepts beyond you, as I know to my sorrow. Still, I understand what these glib radio psychologists mean when they talk about enablers.” She put her ophthalmoscope away with a snap and turned to wash her hands. “If I would have the courage to stop patching you up, perhaps you would stop breaking yourself into pieces. You are foolhardy, which, in case you didn’t know, means to be daring without judgment: I looked it up this morning. How long do you think you can go on this way? A cat has nine lives, but you have only the one, Victoria.”

“You don’t have to tell me; my body’s doing it for you.” I found myself shouting. “My arms are sore. My hamstrings ache. I can hardly walk across the room. I’m getting old. I hate it. I hate not being able to count on my body.”

“So you are going to follow Joan of Arc into the flames before your body fails you and you have to admit you’re mortal?” Lotty gave a twisted smile. “How old was your mother when she died?”

I stared, startled by the unrelated question, and subtracted dates in my head. “Forty–six.”

“And she was ill for two years? It’s a hard feeling, to know you will live longer than a mother who died young, but it is not a crime to do so,” Lotty said. “You’ll turn forty–four next month, won’t you? You don’t need to push yourself past the brink so that you burn up in the next two years. You could have found a dozen ways to learn whether Mr. Frenada was inside his building last night. Make that the intelligent use of your energy, figuring out how to conserve your strength for those times when using your body is your last resort, not your first one. Don’t you think that’s what your mother would want for you?”

Oh, yes, probably. Surely. My mother’s intensity had a blast–furnace quality, but she didn’t prize brute strength above finesse. She’d died of a metastasis from the uterus that became apparent after a miscarriage, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop and I’d brought her pads and changed my own in terror each month for years, wondering when it would happen to me, when I would drain away from the inside. Perhaps Lotty was right. Perhaps I was draining myself from the inside out of some survivor’s guilt. If that was the case, my mother most surely did not want that from me, but life.