She was just coming in from the side-door hallway, carrying two plastic supermarket bags. “I left the trunk open. Maybe you could bring in the cracked corn?”

“The what?”

“I read that chickens love cracked corn.”

He sighed, then tried to regard this in the positive light of a momentary diversion from his darker duties. “Bring it in and put it where?”

“The mudroom would be fine.”

He went out to Madeleine’s car, hefted the fifty-pound bag out of the trunk, struggled for a few seconds with the side door of the house, came in, and dropped the bag in the nearest corner of the mudroom—the positive light fading quickly to a weak flicker.

“You bought a lifetime supply?” he asked when he returned to the kitchen.

“It’s the only size they had. Sorry about that. Are you okay?”

“Fine. I guess I’m a little preoccupied—getting ready to go and meet with someone.”

“Oh—that reminds me—before I forget …” Her tone was pleasantly even. “You have an appointment tomorrow morning with Malcolm.”

“Malcolm Claret?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I called him before I left the clinic. He said he’d just gotten a cancellation and had an opening tomorrow at eleven.”

“No … What I don’t understand is why.”

“Because I’m afraid for you. We’ve discussed that.”

“No, I mean why you made the appointment for me.”

“Because you hadn’t made it yet, and it’s important.”

“So … you just … decided it was up to you?”

“It had to be up to somebody.”

He turned his palms up in a pose of bewilderment. “I don’t quite get that.”

“What is there to get?”

“I wouldn’t make an appointment for you—not unless you asked me to.”

“Even if you thought it might save my life?”

He hesitated. “Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”

She met his gaze and answered softly. “No, I don’t.”

His voice was suddenly filled with exasperation. “You honestly believe an appointment with Malcolm Claret is going to save my life?”

Just as suddenly, her voice was filled with a weary sadness. “If you really don’t want to see him, just cancel the appointment.”

If she’d said that in any other tone, he could imagine himself launching into a grand debate over whose responsibility it was to cancel an appointment she had made, and then he might even segue to the lumber pile she’d ordered for the chicken-house project and how she had a way of starting things that he had to finish and how things always had to happen on her schedule.

But the emotion in her eyes short-circuited all of that.

Besides, it was beginning to dawn on him, strangely, that there might not be any harm in seeing Claret after all.