He was right about that, too. She looked into a mirror, and she didn’t like what she saw. What Jason had done to her was exactly what she did to her own patients. She left her fingerprints inside their brains. She played God. Now, for the first time, she knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end. She wondered how many of the people she’d tried to help found themselves riddled with doubts after it was over. How many of them felt as if they were staring into a well where they couldn’t see the bottom? How many wished they could know the truth again, after the truth had been swept away?

“What really happened out there?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head. “It’s wrong for me to tell you. You didn’t want to remember.”

“Look, if you don’t tell me, I’ll just go downstairs and ask Pam. She knows what you did, right?”

“Yes.”

“So tell me,” Frankie said.

“What do you remember?” Jason asked.

“Nothing. I remember nothing. Just the image of him where he fell. How his body looked. His blood on the rocks.” She stopped, because the image began to get clearer in her brain. The blood was a new detail. She hadn’t seen it before in her flashbacks.

“If I tell you, it might make it worse,” he pointed out. “Sometimes the memories come back more intensely and more painful than before.”

“I’ll take that risk. Right now, I have to know.”

Jason laced his fingers on top of his head, and he grimaced, as if he were on a jury, deciding someone’s guilt or innocence. “Your father didn’t fall. He jumped.”

Frankie’s knees quivered. She felt dizzy, and she pitched forward, and Jason caught her. He helped her to the bed, and then he went to the bathroom and prepared a warm, damp towel, which he dabbed against her face. He sat down next to her, their legs touching.

“I saw it?” she asked.

“You went hiking with him that morning, the way you usually did. He was ahead of you on the cliff trail. You saw what he was about to do, and you shouted for him to stop, but he simply fell. And then you ran to the edge and saw him on the beach below. You couldn’t deal with it. You went back to the campsite. You stayed in your tent for hours, and then finally, you went to find the rangers, and you told them your father was missing.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “For God’s sake, why did he do it? Did I say something? Did we argue?”

“You know he had bouts of depression. He’d talked about suicide before.”

“Yes, but he was the supreme narcissist. It was just talk. I can’t believe he actually did it.”