“You’re back now. You’re good again.”

“When I’m talking about lost time . . . I don’t just mean the past few days.”

“I know.”

He leans forward and rubs his face in his hands and looks at her through the gate of his fingers. “I hurt you.”

“You tried to hurt me. I’m the one who hurt you. You had a knife, I had a gun.” She pulls a chair away from the table and sits down opposite him. “If you’re looking to apologize, don’t bother. You weren’t yourself. I don’t mean that in the normal way. I don’t mean that you were blackout drunk or crazy-exhausted or any of that. I suspect you were literally not yourself.”

“I want to hear more about that. I do. But to be clear, when I said I hurt you . . . I wasn’t talking about two days ago. I wasn’t talking about when I was . . . infected . . . or whatever we’re calling it. I was talking about before.”

A ripple passes over her face like wind over water. “Trauma is an infection too. Grief is an infection too.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Well . . . just know that I’m sorry.”

There is a beat of silence. “Since you seem to be doing better, I think it’s time that we get to work.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” He picks up his coffee mug and sets it back down roughly. “I am doing better, I think. After eating, I’m feeling a little more with it now.”

“That’s good,” she says and stiffens her posture. “Then let’s stop with the Hallmark crap. You tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine?” he says, but her face registers no humor. She’s in full detective mode now. Whatever warmth or vulnerability she displayed a moment ago, her shields are back in place.

He stands up from the table and paces back and forth. “Okay.” He tells her about the samples his grad student collected, her illness, his sleepwalking, the mess he found when he returned to the lab, and the horror he discovered when he visited her apartment. The police had come. He had panicked and climbed out the back window, skidded off the roof, clung to the gutter, then dropped into the sodden backyard and ran. He says it out loud as if trying to convince himself, then nods. Yes. That’s what happened. But everything after that was a gray haze. “I realize it all sounds nuts, and for all I know I’ve had a psychotic break. I honestly have no idea what to think right now. I don’t know if you even believe me. But there it is—there it all is—I’ve unloaded on you.”

A long minute passes and he can tell from her gaze that she is calculating.

“I believe you.”