They laid out their life stories for inspection. Bose: Born in Mumbai during his mother’s ill-fated marriage to an Indian wind turbine engineer, raised there until the age of five. (Which explained the ghost of an accent and his manners, just a touch more genteel than the Texas average.) Brought back to Houston for grade school and subsequently imbued with what he called his mother’s “well-honed sense of injustice,” he had eventually qualified for police training at a time when HPD was in a hiring frenzy. He talked about himself with a sense of humor that struck Sandra as unusual in a cop. Or maybe she had been meeting the wrong cops. In return she gave him the pocket version—to be honest, the carefully edited version—of Sandra Cole: her family in Boston, med school, her job at State. When Bose asked about her choice of career she mentioned a desire to help people; she didn’t mention her father’s suicide or what had happened to her brother Kyle.

The conversation evolved toward triviality as they lingered over coffee, and Sandra left the restaurant still unsure whether she ought to treat this as a professional exchange or a boy-girl size-up. Or which she wanted it to be. She found Bose at least superficially attractive. It wasn’t just his blue eyes and teak-colored skin. It was the way he talked, as if he was speaking from some calm and happily reasonable place deep inside himself. And he seemed equally interested in her, unless she was overinterpreting. Still … did she need this in her life?

Not to mention the inevitable gossip that would ensue in the parched social universe of the State Care staff. Nurse Wattmore beat her back to work by half an hour, time enough to spread the word that Sandra had been lunching with a cop. She got a set of knowing glances and half-smiles from the nurses at Reception. Bad luck—but Wattmore was a force of nature, as unstoppable as the tides.

Of course, the tide of gossip flowed both ways. Sandra knew that Mrs. Wattmore, a widow, forty-four years of age, had slept with three of the four former ward supervisors. “That woman lives in a glass house,” one of the nurses confided in Sandra when they crossed paths in the staff commissary. “You know? Lately she’s been taking her breaks with Dr. Congreve.”

Sandra hurried to her office and closed the door. She had two case summaries that needed writing up. She gave the folders a guilty look and pushed them aside. Then she took the envelope Bose had given her from her purse and tugged out the sheaf of closely written pages and began to read.

*   *   *

She was brimming with fresh questions when she met Bose that evening.