Scott nodded. Friend was not a word he would have used, because when word inevitably got out in academic circles about this charge, he was likely to have none left.

Sally was staring out of the window at the dropping light of the late afternoon. She was in that odd state where a great deal was on her mind, and yet she wasn’t specifically thinking about anything. There was a knock at her door and she spun about to see an office assistant standing sheepishly in the portal, a large white envelope in her hand.

“Sally,” the assistant said, “this just came by courier for you. I wonder if it isn’t something important…”

Sally could think of no pleading nor any other document that she was expecting to arrive in such urgent fashion, but she nodded. “Who is it from?”

“The state bar association.”

Sally took the envelope and looked at it oddly, turning it over in her hand. She could not recall when she had received something from the association, other than dues requests and invitations to dinners, seminars, and speeches that she never attended. None of these ever came by overnight mail, return receipt required.

She tore open the package and removed a single letter. Addressed to her, it came from the head of the state bar, a man she knew only by reputation, a prominent member of a big-time Boston law firm, active in Democratic Party circles with frequent appearances on television talk shows and in newspaper society pages. He was, Sally knew, way out of her league.

She read the short letter carefully. Each second that passed seemed to darken the room around her.

Dear Ms. Freeman-Richards:

This is to inform you of a complaint received by the State Bar Association regarding your handling of the client accounts in the pending matter of Johnson v. Johnson, currently before Judge V. Martinson in Superior Court, Family Division.

The complaint states that funds associated with this matter have been diverted into a private account in your name. This is a violation ofM.G.L. 302, Section 43, and is also a felony under U.S.S. 112, Section 11.

Please be advised that the Bar Association will need your sworn affidavit explaining this matter within the week, or it will be referred to the Hampshire County District Attorney’s Office and to the United States Attorney for the Western District of Massachusetts for prosecution.

Sally thought each word of the letter was caught in her throat, choking her like some wayward piece of meat. “Impossible,” she said out loud. “Absolutely fucking impossible.”

The obscenity clattered around in the room. Sally took a deep breath and spun to her computer. Typing rapidly, she brought up the divorce action cited in the letter from the bar association head. Johnson v. Johnson was not by any description one of her more complicated cases, although it was marred by real animosity between her client, the wife, and her estranged husband. He was a local eye surgeon, father of their two preteen children, a serial cheater, whom Sally had caught trying to move joint assets into an offshore, Bahamas bank account. He had done this particularly clumsily, taking out large cash amounts from their jointly held brokerage account, then charging plane tickets to the Bahamas on his Visa card, in order to get the extra mileage. Sally had successfully moved the court to seize assets and transfer them into her client account pending the final dissolution of the marriage, which was scheduled for sometime after Christmas. By her reckoning, the client account should have had somewhere in excess of $400,000 in it.

It did not.

She stared at the screen and saw that there was less than half that amount.

“That can’t be,” she said, again out loud.

As close to panic as she had ever been, Sally started to go over every transaction in that account. In the past few days more than a quarter million had been extracted through electronic means and transferred to nearly a dozen other accounts. She was unable to access these dozen through the computer, as they were in a series of different names, both of individuals whom she did not recognize and clearly questionable corporations. She also, to her growing anxiety, saw that the last transfer from her client account was made directly into her own checking account. It was for $15,000 and was dated barely twenty-four hours beforehand.

“That cannot be,” she repeated. “How…”

She stopped, right at that second, because the answer to that question was likely to be complicated, and she had no ready answer. All she knew, right at that moment, was that she was likely to be in a great deal of trouble.

“There’s something I just don’t quite get.”

“What’s that?” she asked patiently.

“The why for Michael O’Connell’s love. I mean, he kept saying he loved her, but what had he done in any way, shape, or form that came close to anything that anyone would understand as love?”

“Not too damn much, right?”

“Right. Makes me think that there was something far different on his mind.”

“You may be correct about that,” she replied, as distant, yet as seductive, as always.

She hesitated and, as she often did, seemed to pause to organize her thoughts cautiously. I sensed that she wanted to control the story, but in a way that I couldn’t quite see. This made me shift about uncomfortably. I felt I was being used for something.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that I should give you the name of a man who might help in this regard. A psychologist. He is an expert on obsessive love.” She hesitated again. “Of course, that’s what we call it, but in reality, it has little to do with love. We think of love as roses on Valentine’s Day or maybe greeting-card sentiments. Chocolates in red, heart-shaped boxes, cherubic cupids with wings and tiny bows and arrows, Hollywood romance. But I think it has little to do with any of those things. Love is really much closer to all sorts of dark things within us.”

“You sound cynical,” I said. “And callous.”

She smiled. “I suppose I sound that way. Coming to know someone like Michael O’Connell can, shall we say, give one a different perspective on what precisely constitutes happiness. As I’ve said, he redefined things for folks.”

She shook her head. She reached down to a table and opened a small drawer, rummaging around for an instant or two, before coming out with a small piece of paper and a pencil. “Here.” She wrote down a name. “Talk to this man. Tell him I sent you.”

She put her head back and laughed, although nothing was funny. “And tell him that I waive any conflict-of-interest or physician-client privilege. No, better yet”-she wrote something down swiftly on the piece of paper-“I’ll do that myself.”

16

Ashley moved away from the window cautiously, just as she had every day for more than two weeks.

She was unaware of what was taking place with the three people who constituted her family, focused instead on the near constant sensation that she was being watched. The problem was, every time the feeling threatened to overcome her, she could find no concrete evidence to support it. A quick and sudden turn while walking to a class or to her job at the museum turned up nothing except some surprised and inconvenienced pedestrians behind her. She had taken to darting onto the T just as the train doors were closing, then intensely eyeing all the other passengers as if the old lady reading the Herald or the workman in the battered Red Sox cap could be O’Connell in some elaborate disguise. At home, she edged to the corner of the window in her apartment and peered up and down her street. She listened at her door for some telltale noise before exiting. She started varying her route when she went out, even if only heading to the grocery store or pharmacy. She purchased a telephone with caller ID and added the same service to her cell phone. She spoke to her neighbors, asking them if any of them had noticed anything out of the ordinary or, in particular, if they had seen a man fitting Michael O’Connell’s description hanging around the entranceway or by the street corner or maybe in back. None were able to help, in that none could recall seeing anyone like him acting suspiciously.