“I don’t know, Ree. You think about it,” Jeanette said, “and I’ll think about it, and then we’ll exchange notes later.” She swung her legs out of bed and stood.

2

A few miles from the prison, on the deck of the Norcross home, Anton the pool guy was skimming for dead bugs. The pool had been Dr. Clinton Norcross’s tenth anniversary present to his wife, Lila. The sight of Anton often made Clint question the wisdom of this gift. This morning was one of those times.

Anton was shirtless, and for two good reasons. First, it was going to be a hot day. Second, his abdomen was a rock. He was ripped, was Anton the pool guy; he looked like a stud on the cover of a romance novel. If you shot bullets at Anton’s abdomen, you’d want to do it from an angle, in case of a ricochet. What did he eat? Mountains of pure protein? What was his workout? Cleaning the Augean Stables?

Anton glanced up, smiling from under the shimmering panes of his Wayfarers. With his free hand he waved at Clint, who was watching from the second-floor window of the master bathroom.

“Jesus Christ, man,” Clint said quietly to himself. He waved back. “Have a heart.”

Clint sidled away from the window. In the mirror on the closed bathroom door there appeared a forty-eight-year-old white male, BA from Cornell, MD from NYU, modest love handles from Starbucks Grande Mochas. His salt and pepper beard was less woodcutter-virile, more lumpen one-legged sea captain.

That his age and softening body should come as any kind of a surprise struck Clint as ironic. He had never had much patience with male vanity, especially the middle-aged variety, and cumulative professional experience had, if anything, trimmed that particular fuse even shorter. In fact, what Clint thought of as the great turning point of his medical career had occurred eighteen years earlier, in 1999, when a prospective patient named Paul Montpelier had come to the young doctor with a “crisis of sexual ambition.”

He had asked Montpelier, “When you say ‘sexual ambition,’ what do you mean?” Ambitious people sought promotions. You couldn’t really become vice-president of sex. It was a peculiar euphemism.

“I mean . . .” Montpelier appeared to weigh various descriptors. He cleared his throat and settled on, “I still want to do it. I still want to go for it.”

Clint said, “That doesn’t seem unusually ambitious. It seems normal.”

Fresh from his psych residency, and not yet softening, this was only Clint’s second day in the office and Montpelier was just his second patient.

(His first patient had been a teenager with some anxieties about her college applications. Pretty quickly, however, it had emerged that the girl had received a 1570 on her SATs. Clint pointed out that this was excellent, and there had been no need for treatment or a second appointment. Cured! he had dashed off on the bottom of the yellow legal pad he used to take notes on.)