Dana had a strange look. She was zoning out, looking like she was barely aware he was in the room.

“What’s wrong?” Adam asked.

She seemed far away for a while longer; then she focused and said, “Nothing.”

“You see my point now, don’t you?”

“Gabriela didn’t rob our house:” said she. She sounded oddly distant.

“What? What’re you talking about?”

“She wouldn’t do that,” she said. “I could see her getting desperate, wanting to help her father, but I can’t see her actually breaking into our house. That isn’t something she’d do.”

“I disagree,” Adam said. He glanced at the clock- 8:26. Damn, he had to get going. “She had a relationship with Sanchez, she made him copies of our keys and got him the code to the alarm. It makes sense that she broke in.”

“Then who killed her?” Dana asked.

Adam didn’t have an answer to this, so he said, “I agree there are some holes.”

“Oh, really,” she said sarcastically. “You’ve come to that conclusion, huh?”

Adam couldn’t remember- was his appointment with David Rothman at nine or ten? If it was at nine he’d never make it.

Turning on his BlackBerry to check, he said, “You have to give the police a little more time. Clements seemed confident last night that they’ll get a break in the case. I bet you they’ll make an arrest by the end of the day. Meanwhile, the cops are right outside.”

Dana said something, but Adam was distracted, looking at his BlackBerry. Shit, it was at nine. “Sorry,” he said, “what was that?”

“I said I think this is all about your ego. You think if you run away you’ll be admitting you did something wrong.”

Adam considered this, then said, “When I was in ju nior high and kids threatened to beat me up every day after school, I never had a problem at all running away from them. Trust me, if I believed I was in any danger at all right now, or you or Marissa was in any danger, I’d have no problem running away. But in this case I just don’t think that’s necessary.”

“Yeah? And what if you’re wrong?”

It was 8:28.

“I know you don’t like it when I leave in middiscussion, but I have no choice,” he said. He gave her his usual quick kiss good- bye and then said, “I’ll call you in a couple of hours, okay?” and left.

Adam arrived at his office at a few minutes past nine. David Rothman was in the waiting area, reading Newsweek. “Morning, David, I’ll be with you in one sec,” Adam said and went toward his office. He passed Lauren in the corridor; they exchanged good mornings, and he noticed that she didn’t seem quite as cold and distant as she had yesterday. Adam hadn’t bought a newspaper on the way to work, but he’d glanced at other people’s papers on the subway and knew that at least he wasn’t frontpage news again. Hopefully there were no mentions of him at all in today’s papers and the whole story was starting to fade.

Adam got settled in, refilled the water pitcher, and then reviewed his notes on his previous sessions with David. Things had been going well in David’s therapy lately. He had been seeing Adam for over ten weeks now with various issues, including some associated with middle age, as he had recently turned fifty. His wife had a drinking problem, and he had associated code penden cy issues, as well as difficulty expressing his anger, to his wife and in general. When he started seeing Adam, he’d been acting out by having a series of one- night stands with women he’d picked up at bars, and Adam felt he exhibited several telltale signs of sex addiction. They’d been working on techniques for expressing his anger, and, with Adam’s guidance, he had managed to convince his wife to go to AA. While he still expressed the desire to philander, they had been working on various behavior modification techniques, and David hadn’t cheated on his wife at all under Adam’s care.

Adam returned to the waiting room and said, “David, come on in.” David entered the office and settled on the couch, and he and Adam exchanged their usual small talk. David worked in advertising, and his company had a skybox at Madison Square Garden, so they discussed the Knicks for a minute or so. Adam was hoping the shooting wouldn’t come up, but those hopes were dashed when David said, “Oh, yeah, so I heard about what happened. Is everything okay with that?”

“Yes, thank you,” Adam said. “It was a difficult situation, but my family’s handling it.”

He was trying to sound professional and curt and not to be at all evasive, though he was eager to get on to another topic.

“That’s good,” David said. “I imagine stuff like that gets blown out of proportion in the news.”

“It does,” Adam said flatly. “So how’re you doing?”

David began by talking about an ongoing issue he had with a coworker he didn’t get along with, and Adam noticed that he seemed particularly agitated- shifting around a lot, crossing and uncrossing his legs. It was hard for Adam to be as attentive as he normally was during a session. He couldn’t help wondering if David’s agitation had to do with what he’d heard about the shooting or if it meant he didn’t feel comfortable with Adam as his therapist. Adam was mulling over whether to be assertive and ask David what was bothering him or to ignore the whole thing.

But then Adam realized he was way off base when David said, “So anyway, I, uh, met a woman the other night.”

Well, that explained the agitation; this was a major setback for David.

Wanting to keep his patient feeling reassured and at ease, Adam asked in a very normal, nonjudgmental tone, “Where did you meet her?”

“Online,” David said. He crossed his legs, then uncrossed them again. His forehead was glistening with sweat. “I mean, not online, I mean through an online service… Ashley Madison.”

Adam knew of Ashley Madison and other similar extramarital dating services. Several of his patients frequently met sex partners through these sites.

“Okay,” Adam said calmly, waiting for David to continue on his own.

David explained how he’d registered with Ashley Madison and then had arranged to meet a woman, Linda- who was married with two kids- at a hotel and had sex with her. When he described what had happened, and especially when he mentioned the sex and how “hot and raw” it was, David started talking faster and louder, and Adam could tell how exhilarating the whole experience had been for him. It was very similar to the way a drug addict would behave when describing the experience of doing drugs; in fact, in a previous session David had told Adam about the coke habit he’d kicked several years ago. This had hardly been surprising to Adam, since most sex addicts have other addictions and are frequently codependent. All in all, David was just about as textbook as they get.

As David finished telling the story, his lips started quivering, and then the tears came, flowing down his cheeks, and he said, “I don’t know why…” He was crying harder and had to get hold of himself. Finally he said, “I don’t know why I keep doing this. I don’t know… I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

David had cried before during sessions- he was a sympathy seeker- and Adam gave him tissues and reassured him, saying things like “It’s okay” and “I know how hard it is.” David, as usual, was blaming himself for his behavior, playing the victim, saying, “I feel like such a piece of shit. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with my life anymore.” Adam advised him not to beat himself up about it too badly and reminded him that the Internet could be very tempting for anybody and that these things happened, using the same tactics he’d employ in any similar therapy session, trying to support and reassure his patient. All the time, though, he couldn’t help feeling like a total fraud. Who the hell was he to counsel anyone when his own life had been such a mess lately? And trying to treat David for philandering was the biggest joke of all, what with David sitting on the very couch where Adam had screwed Sharon Wasserman. Adam was telling David, “You don’t have to feel like you always have to be perfect,” and meanwhile he couldn’t help imaging Sharon on top of him, riding him, his hands on her breasts. Adam told David, “Just because you want to have sex with another woman doesn’t mean you have to actually do it,” remembering how he’d said Sharon’s name again and again when he came.