My heart sank.

"I guess he's some piece of work. Strangled a couple cats around the island a year or so back. Nearly burned down the Bishop estate. And he's got a history of breaking and entering every place within walking distance." He grinned. "From Russia with love, huh?"

"The way I heard it," I said, "nobody has any idea whether he's involved. They haven't ruled out sudden infant death syndrome."

"C'mon. The kid's got the whole profile. What odds you want to give me he's a bedwetter?"

Rossetti was referring to the triad of bedwetting, fire setting, and cruelty to animals typical of budding psychopaths.

"He's a juvenile," I said. "And he hasn't been charged. Who's leaking his life story?"

"Who else? Harrigan-the D.A. This case is a rocket ship, and he knows it. He could ride the publicity right to the Attorney General's office."

"So I heard."

He put a hand on my shoulder, looked at the floor. "Listen," he whispered, "if I wanted to come in for a tune-up, like… You know, no major overhaul. I'm basically good. A couple sessions, maybe. That kind of thing."

"No problem," I said automatically. I was having trouble dragging my mind away from Nantucket.

He dropped his voice even lower. "I don't want to ask any special favors. But I know you been some of the same places I been in life, and I don't want to go there no more, if you get what I'm saying."

"Give me a call. We'll set something up right away." Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Justine watching us.

She noticed me noticing her and went back to reading her book.

Rossetti slapped me on the shoulder, took a couple steps back. "You look friggin' fantastic," he half-shouted. "Still got the bike?"

We'd taken our Harleys to the White Mountains after our last session. I nodded.

"They'll throw mine in the box with me, Doc, 'cause I'm ridin' till the light turns red for good." He pointed at my head, winked. "What about one of them weaves? They're good now. You can hardly tell." He started toward the bar, where Mario, no doubt, was already steaming his milk.

I walked the rest of the way to Justine. She was reading Angela's Ashes. "Light reading?" I said.

She lowered the book. "So sad, Frank. What they went through." She pulled out a chair.

I sat down. Her olive skin, full lips, and deep brown eyes steadied me. Something ugly inside me has always retreated in the face of feminine beauty.

"You look tense. What is the matter?" she asked.

"Rough day," I said, and left it at that.

"What? What was rough?"

I'm used to asking the questions. Answering for a change felt uncomfortable and inviting at the same time. I pointed at her book. "People. Their suffering. Knowing what you can do for them, and what you can't."

"Yes," she said. The look in her eyes made me feel she might actually understand. "This has to be very difficult." She drank the last of her coffee. "For me this would be too much."

I motioned to Mario for a refill, took a drag off my cigarette. "Why do you think that?"

"I could not keep myself… how do you say?… apart from it."

"I've got the same trouble."

Justine used the tip of her finger to steal a bit of the froth off my coffee, licked it away. "But you see patients even knowing this. You don't worry for yourself?"

"Every day."

A few seconds of silence passed. "My day," she said, "was mostly thinking of you."

The last of the tightness in my jaw and neck melted away. I took her hand and felt my pulse slow.

I took her home. My place. A nineteen-hundred-square-foot Chelsea loft with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the steel skeleton of the Tobin Bridge as it arches into Boston. The building had been constructed as a factory when the Industrial Revolution transformed Chelsea from farmland and summer homes to coal yards and textile mills. It had stood through two fires that burned most of the city to the ground, in 1908 and 1973. It had stood as the city welcomed wave upon wave of immigrants-the Irish speaking Gaelic, Russian Jews escaping anti-Semitism, Italians, Poles, Puerto Ricans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, El Salvadorians, Guatemalans, Serbs.

My view was as raw and beautiful as a heavyweight bout. In the foreground: triple deckers, smokestacks, tugboats driving full throttle against the massive hulls of oil tankers on the Mystic River. In the distance: the shimmering skyline of Boston 's financial district.

Justine, elegant and slim in tight black cigarette pants and a fitted black sleeveless shirt, stood facing one of the windows as I poured her a Merlot and myself a Perrier.

"Cheers," I said, handing her the glass.

She noticed I wasn't joining her. "No wine?"

"I can't drink." I paused. "Actually, I can drink more than anybody I know. I just can't stop."

"Why not?"

"Why not what?"

"Why can't you stop?"

For a moment I thought we were separated by a language barrier, that she wasn't getting the fact that I was in recovery from alcohol, among other things. But then she looked at me in the same knowing way she had at Café Positano, and I realized she had intended the question- and wanted the answer. I nodded. "I can't stop because I lose myself in the booze. And I end up never wanting to find myself."

"Right."

"Thanks. I hate being wrong about my own disease. It makes me wonder whether I'm worth my hourly rate."

She laughed. As she moved, her collar gaped open enough for me to glimpse her cleavage and the top of her black lace bra. "No," she said. "I mean, I understand." She sipped her wine.

I still felt the need to explain. "It's like having a headache that finally goes away with a pill. You might have struggled through the pain before, but now you know relief is just a swallow away. So you keep swallowing. And meanwhile, underneath the waves of calm, your life is unraveling."

"I understand. My mother died of this."

I felt like an idiot. "Of alcoholism."

"Yes. They have this even in Brazil."

"I'm sorry. I…"

She left me at the window and walked over to the largest of five paintings I had hanging on a brick wall that ran the length of the place. It was a six-by-nine-foot canvas by Bradford Johnson depicting the rescue of the crew of a sailing ship by another vessel. A rope is tied between their masts, high above the raging seas, and a man dangles by his hands as he traverses the fragile connection. "I like this very much," she said.

I walked to her side. "What do you like about it?"

"Taking a risk to help someone." She pointed at the ship that was still in one piece. "That one could have kept sailing."

Her comment made me think again of the sixteen-year-old Bishop boy, probably headed for trial as an adult, facing life in prison. Would the system stop long enough to listen to him? Then I thought what it would be like to hear about the animals he had tortured, about his torture in Russia, about Darwin Bishop finding one of his baby girls dead in her crib. I thought about having to feel all the jealousy and fear and anger coursing through the family, in order to understand whether it could have added up to murder. "What if both ships end up sinking?" I half-joked.

"Then taking the risk was even more beautiful," she said.

In my heart I agreed. But coming close to drowning in the undertow of Trevor Lucas's terror had left me with deep respect for solid ground. I pushed the Bishops out of my mind and reached for Justine, using her beauty to anchor me in the moment. My hand found the soft curve of her arm, just above the elbow, then moved down her rib cage, not stopping until my fingers were curled under the waistband of her pants.

She touched her lips to mine, then leaned back. "Perhaps we should not start," she said. "I am in this country only one more day."