Benton was looking out his window again, talking to the bricks.

“There isn’t anything different she could have done,” he said. “What he did to her absolutely wasn’t her fault. In many ways, it wasn’t his fault. He would never do that sober. Not even close.”

“You certainly sound convinced,” Dr. Thomas said.

Benton turned away from the window and stared at what was on his computer screen. Then he looked out his window again as if the steely cold sky was a message for him, a metaphor. He removed a paper clip from a journal article he was revising and stapled the pages together, suddenly furious. The American Psychological Society probably wasn’t going to accept yet another damn research article on emotional responses to members of social outgroups. Someone from Princeton just published basically the same damn thing Benton was about to submit. He straightened the paper clip. The challenge was to straighten it without a trace of a kink. In the end, they always snapped.

“Of all people, to be so irrational,” he said. “So out of touch. And I have been. From day one. Irrational about everything, and now I’m about to pay for it.”

“You’re about to pay for it because other people know what your friend Pete Marino did to her?”

“He’s not my friend.”

“I thought he was. I thought you thought he was,” Dr. Thomas said.

“We never socialized. We have nothing in common. Bowling, fishing, motorcycles, watching football, and drinking beer. Well, not beer. Not now. That’s Marino. That’s not me. Now that I think about it, I don’t recall ever even going out to dinner with him, just the two of us. Not in twenty years. We have nothing in common. We’ll never have anything in common.”

“He’s not from an elitist New England family? He didn’t go to graduate school, was never an FBI profiler? He’s not on the faculty of Harvard Medical School? Is that what you mean?”

“I’m not trying to be a snob,” Benton said.

“Seems as if the two of you have Kay in common.”

“Not that way. It never went that far,” Benton said.

“How far did it need to go?”

“She told me it never went that far. He did other things. When she finally got undressed in front of me, I could see what he did. She made excuses for a day or two. Lied. I knew damn well she hadn’t shut the hatchback on her wrists.”

Benton remembered bruises as dark as thunderclouds and shaped exactly the way they would be had someone pinned her hands behind her and held her against the wall. She’d offered no explanation at all when Benton finally saw her breasts. No one had ever done anything like that to her before, and he had never seen anything like that before except in cases he worked. When he’d sat on the bed looking at her, he’d felt as if a monstrous cretin had mangled the wings of a dove or mauled a child’s tender flesh. He’d imagined Marino trying to eat her.