“I didn’t want her to forget that the kids had died,” she said. “She dealt with loss every day. It was too much a part of who she was as a nurse. Instead, I helped her believe that she wasn’t really in the room when it happened. She didn’t see them die with her own eyes. I was hoping that would be enough to let her work through it. Monica wasn’t fragile. Nurses are tough. This was simply one tragedy too many.”

“Did the treatment work?” Jason asked.

“I thought it did. Monica called me a few weeks later. She was working as a nurse again. Graveyard-shift ER. It doesn’t get harder than that. But she sounded happy. She was calling to thank me.”

“So you did your job, Frankie. Don’t second-guess yourself.”

“Yes, but now she’s dead, and so is Brynn Lansing. That’s two of my patients showing signs of severe brain dysfunction.”

Jason shook his head. “Whatever happened to them wasn’t your fault.”

“How do you know?” Frankie asked.

He had no answer for her. He was just trying to make her feel better. He put an arm around her waist as they stood by the windows. She liked the closeness of him. She could see his reflection in the glass—his short, gelled dark hair; his sharply angled chin; his arching eyebrows and intense stare. He wore gray dress slacks and a slim-fit forest-green shirt. Her fingertips drifted onto his thigh, making soft circles, but then she pulled away, and she could feel his disappointment.

“Is it possible?” she asked.

“What?”

“Could I have harmed these women with my memory treatment?”

Jason scowled. It was late, and he didn’t want a clinical discussion. She knew what he really wanted. Sex.

“I can’t say it’s impossible,” he admitted. “There aren’t any absolutes in brain chemistry, you know that. People behave in unexpected ways. All I can tell you is that it’s very unlikely that your treatment could have produced such an extreme reaction, particularly so long after the therapy ended. I’m not saying the possibility is zero, but the risk is low.”

“Risk,” Frankie murmured. She was thinking about her father again.

It was funny how everything eventually led her back to him and their last weekend together. She couldn’t escape it. The theme of the discussion he’d chosen for their annual camping trip was risk. What chances are you willing to take to get what you want? What dangers do your choices create for other people? She could hear her father’s voice in her head; it had no intonations, no ups, no downs. He lectured and posed questions the way a professor would, rather than a father with a child. He jabbed with his finger to make his points. His grizzled face didn’t move.