She stood up, dismayed to discover that her foot had fallen asleep. Somehow, she made it to the door. As she was about to walk out, David said, “Mara, by the way, is fine.”

“Wonderful.” She lifted her dead foot a few inches off the floor and tried to shake it discreetly. “Give her my best.”

3.

She wanted pills. She wanted to wait in line at Walgreen’s with all the other prescription junkies and hand in her slip and be given a cheap, amber vial of small, expensive pills that would, within a matter of hours, minutes, make her feel better about everything. She didn’t want a solution, she didn’t want to sort through her feelings, she wanted to simply not care. She’d been so infuriatingly shortsighted when she went into her I-hate-drugs monologue with Dr. Berman all those months ago.

Everything she hadn’t told Dr. Berman or had told him in some abbreviated or altered form was piling up on top of her, and the weight of it was starting to crush her. As she sat in Berman’s office, looking at him as he looked at her, each waiting for the other to speak, she thought about how, in the last month, their relationship had changed. His signals weren’t as easy to read, his silences were more ominous, his eyes were more stern. He’d lost respect for her, she could tell. It shouldn’t matter, since her own respect for him was a little soft, but somehow it did. She knew she ought to either break down and tell him everything, or drop out of treatment altogether, maybe find another shrink with whom she could make a fresh start.

I’d be happier if you were my wife. Tell him that. Start there.

“Something I forgot to tell you,” she said.

He raised his chin, nothing more encouraging than that.

“The dog left a few days ago. Remember I told you about Helen, my husbands colleague’s dog?”

Yes, he remembered. He remembered everything. For all she knew, he remembered things she hadn’t even told him.