She smiled. “I lasted the month, then I met a man at the Castle Gardens, that dance hall on State Street. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was even more infantile about his needs than I was. He had a job, a car, decent apartment, and he spent everything he made on himself. He went out to a cocktail lounge or a movie every night, and at the age of thirty, that sort of thing should have worn thin. I don’t know, it has with me already. Anyway, we went around, and then I moved in with him.”

It was what Leland should have known, but had closed his mind to: a woman working toward a breakdown. He saw her as she was now, whole, even if pieced together, and it did not seem that a full-scale coming-apart really was possible. It had been; it had been the only way she could have come to be as she was. She had to be close to people, apprised, unreserving, firmly established. There were things that she missed; they came up so often, it was as if the piecing together had been a make-do job. The whole experience had not made her a different person than she had been. Therapy had not provided her with a new birth certificate, only with another diploma.

She had missed his surprise with the easy telling of Dr. Roberts’ suggestion. Leland had had no intimate contact with therapy, only what he had heard from acquaintances and what he had read in a few books, but he understood that public policy could be left at the doctor’s door—which was right when public policy had been a destructive influence on the patient right along. It was also possible that Roberts had not been making a suggestion, but asking a question about her behavior. The answer was interesting and it showed another thing about Colin MacIver. Their marriage had been a success; the man who had cracked about getting value in therapy had been able to fill her needs.