“You okay now?” she asked gently.

He nodded.

“Do you want more?”

He peered in the cup and tossed the rest of it back. “I think I’m better now. That was embarrassing. I’m so sorry.”

“Please don’t apologize for coughing. Shall we go back to your concerns about true intimacy?”

They chatted more, and as he shared his concerns about the lack of sex with his wife, she felt a strange sense of déjà vu. She flashed back to her last session with Shayla. The problems mirrored Shayla’s challenges. Shayla had even said before that her husband had a paranoid side. Could he be so worried about trying to keep her that he was infiltrating her therapist to try to learn what sort of advice Shayla was getting? Could this man actually be Shayla’s husband? With a fake name?

No, she sharply admonished herself. Plenty of couples had marital woes and there was no need for her to jump to any conclusions, and assume Shayla’s hubby was here under false pretenses.

She had no true evidence that he was a fraud, so she mentally talked herself down. For now she had to treat him as she would anyone else. Besides, he seemed open to some of her suggestions about reconnecting with his wife, so she recommended a book for him that she thought might be helpful. “I don’t have a copy to loan you, but perhaps you could check it out on Amazon or your bookstore,” she said, and he grabbed a pen and small notebook from inside his jacket.

He spread the notebook open on the ottoman in front of him, then dipped his hand into his pocket once more and pushed on a pair of glasses. “Can’t see a damn thing up close without these on,” he said, then wrote down the name she gave him, folded up the paper and removed his glasses once more. She caught the briefest glimpse of him with the glasses on—thick and black—and it was as if she’d been shot back to the night she went to Gia’s with Jack. The man she’d bumped into outside her building had worn glasses like that—thick and black. He’d had dark hair too, but it was longer, wasn’t it? The memory was far too fuzzy, and that’s all she could latch onto. It had been such a lightning-fast encounter that more than two weeks later she couldn’t recall any more details.

And really, what were the chances that this man was the same guy? Even if she had bumped into Clark, maybe he’d just been doing his research and scoping out the building before the appointment, to get the lay of the land. A lot of patients did that. That was normal. Plus, he’d said he was a market researcher, so it would make sense that he’d checked things out in advance.

But after he left, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. Perhaps it was simply this day. Perhaps it was a side effect of Shayla’s nosiness. Lately, she’d been feeling like others knew things about her before she learned them. And she didn’t like being in that position.