The first week they were watching over her, Jane had been forced to take Helen to work one day and everyone at the station had been so amazed, in that jokey, irritating way, at the spectacle of seeing her, of all people, with a dog, she realized that most of her co-workers regarded her as a hard-edged, slightly bitter person, the type who had neither the tenderness nor the patience to care about a pet. Chloe Barnes had looked from dog to Jane to dog to Jane with her usual pitying gaze. In truth, Jane was proud of her lack of sentimentality about house pets (a trait Gerald had inherited in an extreme form), but she’d begun dragging Helen into work with her almost every day, just to prove that people didn’t know her as well as they all thought. Thomas bled sympathy for the dog—“Poor old Helen, what’s going to become of you?”—although he did little to actually care for her. Upon seeing her arrive for one of their talks with Helen in tow, Dale had said, “I never figured you for a dog-lover, Janey.” “You seem to forget,” she’d said, “that I’m a mother,” a comment which she’d meant as proof of her ability to nurture but had sounded all wrong.

Jane adjusted her rearview mirror and said: “I suppose I should have told Dr. Berman that Dale and I exchanged a few kisses last time I saw him.”

Helen replied with an unruffled sigh.

“Well, I intended to, but when I told him we’d gone out for coffee four times—which is the truth, if you count the martinis as coffee—he gave me one of those knowing looks of his, as if to say he could see the handwriting on the wall. And believe me, Helen, I’m not paying him all that money so he can cop a superior attitude.”

Not to mention that the business of their encounter along the Esplanade last week—mid-afternoon, in a moment of azure beauty when the wind that had been blowing all day just died and the sailboats in the river basin went still, as if someone had flipped the switch on a magnetized electronic game and the surface of the water became a sheet of stretched silk—had been a harmless lapse in judgment, nothing more or less. It was part of Dale’s compulsive need to flirt. It would have made more of an event of the whole thing if she’d pushed him away or berated him instead of letting him wrap his arms around her and nuzzle his face against her neck and start nibbling her ear.

“And you have to admit I’ve been a lot more patient with Thomas since I started having coffee with Dale. True?”