Ron was treated and eventually released but continued to have trouble outside the hospital. That’s the problem, Amanda thought, not without a pinch of distaste. Mental hospitals were overcrowded and understaffed. There’s just not enough time and money.

The same thing had happened with Jonathan. She had found him easy to work with, receptive, open about his experiences in the war. Still, she had searched for something else. She sensed he was holding something back. Exactly what that thing was remained unclear, and he was released before she was able to break through.

Her head ached dreadfully, and the paperwork was piled up high on one corner of her desk, but she couldn’t concentrate. Nothing has happened yet, she reminded herself. Not technically, no; but she knew he liked her very much (was well aware of it in fact, and used that to get close to him—something she did not mind doing), and thought surely he would have called by now, simply to talk with her.

It’s just your pride, Amanda, she told herself with a thin smile. You just don’t want to admit that one of the patients is leaving the nest and doesn’t need you anymore. That type of recovery was rare in these cases, but it could happen, she supposed. He had been doing very well, especially in the last couple of sessions.

She would give him a few more days, and then if she still hadn’t heard from him, well, then she would get in touch herself somehow. It couldn’t hurt, right?

Dr. Amanda Seigel took the first of the heavy folders off the pile on her desk with a sigh, and started thumbing through it, letting Jon Newman slip back into a far corner of her mind. The amount of work was unbelievable; new patients to familiarize herself with, old files to be closed, meetings to attend. She was giving a talk on erotic paranoid disorders in another week, and she had hardly begun preparing for it.

It would be several days before she thought seriously of Jonathan again, and by then, it was very nearly too late.

Dan Flint, in the offices of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, rocked quickly back and forth in his chair the way he did when he was doing a lot of heavy thinking. Upon brief observation, someone not familiar with his moods might have supposed that he was picking out the scores for this week’s basketball pool, or maybe just holding back the cramps from a bad case of diarrhea. But in truth, he was working hard on the Jackson pumped storage problem, turning the figures over in his head.

The team had returned with new water samples from the river near the plant, and the samples had been turned over to the lab for testing. Flint imagined the men stepping out onto the frozen surface of the river, and shivered.