Nora looked at me with resolute, still eyes. She wasn’t caught up in passion and self-pity as Harry had been-she was capable of murder. She gestured with her gun as she spoke, but it swung back to me as if drawn by magnetism.

“After I’d left Harry, I went home and thought. I knew I had a choice. Either I left it to you and you’d give him pills and talk to him, get him to accept defeat, or we could fight. That was the only way I’d get my Harry back and not a shadow. I realized that you’d given him an alibi. He couldn’t be convicted of murder if we acted fast.”

“Why did you choose me?” I said, remembering the moment I’d arrived at Episcopal on Monday morning to be told by Jim Whitehead that Harry had refused to be treated by anyone else. He’d come in on Saturday to see Harry, he’d told me, but the Shapiros had wanted their privacy. Now I knew why.

“You’d been kind in the emergency room and you were young. Whitehead was older and more obstinate. I thought you’d be, I don’t know …”

“Malleable?” I suggested.

“Oh, dear. That sounds bad,” she said, as if it mattered anymore what word I used. “I just thought you wouldn’t ask questions. Sarah was so eager to help.”

She certainly was, I thought. When I looked back on it, Nora had expertly ambushed me. Duncan and Harry had appeared to be forcing me to do what he wanted, but Nora had fixed the whole thing. The image of her sitting on the bed in Harry’s room in York East as we had discussed him came back to me-both mother and seductress.

“You went to all that trouble and he still wouldn’t do what you wanted. How did you feel about that?” I said.

It was the harshest question I’d asked, but I was already tired of playing along with her narrative. It had a weird logic, killing Greene in order to save her husband. Yet kill him Nora had. Harry’s confession to the crime had been a concoction.

“You can take the credit for that,” Nora said, regarding me coldly. “You were too good at your job. You got him talking on the beach and he told you things he shouldn’t have. After you’d left, he told me he was thinking of therapy.”

She laughed as if my profession were absurd, and for the first time since I’d known her, I started to hate her. All the kindness she’d shown me-how she’d flown me on their jet to London and asked after my father-had been calculated. She hadn’t wanted to lose me as Harry’s doctor because she’d thought I’d be compliant.

“By Saturday, I got tired of waiting,” she said. “I called Felix and he came over to the apartment. I said I knew what he’d done to Harry and he was a spineless coward. He said he’d try to make it up, so I told him what to do.”

That was what Felix meant, I thought. He had walked into the sea and drowned himself. Was that the act of a man who’d merely been indiscreet about Harry’s affair to his old friends at Rosenthal? That shouldn’t have been enough to prompt suicide. Felix had been far more involved in Greene’s murder than he’d confessed, and he’d known that his deception was unraveling. Nora had made him pay dearly for his betrayal of Harry.

“Felix called Marcus and told him he should contact us that afternoon. When he called, I said Harry wanted to see him in East Hampton later. Harry was in a bad way, not coherent. The pills hadn’t helped, they’d made it worse. He was lying on his bed, really depressed. I took him to the car and I drove him out there. We left Felix in the apartment. I thought he might be needed.

“When we arrived, I gave Harry the Beretta and told him what to do. He was shaking and sweating, very ill. I was so sad for him. I went to the study and I waited. I heard the whole thing on the intercom. Harry brought Greene in here. He’d just walked from Sagaponack, he said. It was such a nice day. Harry told him he knew everything he’d done, and Greene just laughed. ‘Too late now, Harry,’ he said.

“I waited for Harry to do it, but he was too far gone. It was like Greene had cast a spell over him. I wasn’t thinking straight. My head felt jammed and I couldn’t hear myself breathe. I’d brought a gun from New York. I walked out of the study and along the back of the house. I saw Marcus with his back to me. I came through the conservatory. He didn’t notice me until I was inside.”

“You killed him?” I asked.

“He turned toward me. He looked shocked, like he couldn’t grasp it, when he saw the gun, I remember. Then he smiled. I don’t think he thought I could do it. He was stupid. When Harry bought that gun for me, there was something I didn’t tell you. I learned to use it on a range.”

As she said it, she swung the Beretta up with both hands, one wrapped over the other around the stock, and pointed it directly at me. Her arms briefly locked in position and my heart raced. Then she lowered it, the demonstration over.

“I didn’t say anything, I just shot him in the chest. He went down and lay on the ground twitching. There was a lot of blood right away. I knew he was dying.”

I thought of the photo of Greene lying on the floor that Pagonis had pushed in front of me at Yaphank, and I glanced at the spot on the floor where Anna had made me stand to punish me. I’d had no idea what she’d really meant.

“Did you try to save him?”

“Why would I have done that?” she said, as if the idea were stupid. “I wanted him out of our lives forever. I wanted Harry back.”

“You got what you wanted, then?”

She looked happy for the first time, remembering it. “I did. It was as if the sound of the gun woke Harry up. He took charge. I was standing here, shocked at what I’d done. He took the gun from me and said, ‘You have to leave.’ He wiped off my prints and he fired it again out of the window.”

Nora waved the gun toward the ocean, as if indicating the path of the bullet. “That’s what saved Harry,” she said. “Not pills. Not a talkabout it.”

She kept saying that word -talk, talk, talk-and every time she did, she sounded more scathing. I wondered if she hated me as much as my profession, and if that was why she was holding a gun on me. I’d defied the rules of psychiatry, but I’d found her by asking questions. Asking questions had its uses. It occurred to me as I listened that Pagonis had a lot to answer for. She’d taken Nora at her word and instead tried to bully me into undermining Harry’s defense. The fingerprints on the gun, the powder burns on Harry’s hands, the call to New York from East Hampton-she’d fallen for everything that Nora had faked to throw her off the trail. I’d been naive, but her performance had been terrible.

“I called Felix in New York to tell him to come for me,” she went on. “I knew I couldn’t leave in the Range Rover. Harry had to have driven it there. There was only one way to escape. On foot.”

I nodded, for I knew where she’d gone. Look around, Anna had called to me. Nora had killed Greene in the room where we sat, yards from their lawn and beyond that the steps down the dune to their private wilderness. It was labeled public, but it wasn’t really. No stranger could make it there without approval. Greene had died in a cottage with a ready-made escape route-that’s where Nora had lured him.

“I walked along the beach until I got close to Water Mill. There’s a road that leads down to the dunes there and I waited for Felix to come and pick me up. He had a place near there. I went to shower and clean myself off. Then we drove back to the house.”

She stopped talking, exhausted, and I tried to work out what to do next. The talk had delayed the moment of confrontation, but she’d soon either have to put the gun down or use it-we couldn’t stay in this standoff forever. Whenever I was caught with patients who could turn violent, I retreated. That wasn’t an option here. Her eyes looked slightly softer, some of the steeliness gone.

“I think you should give me that, Mrs. Shapiro,” I said, holding out a hand toward her and trying not to look threatening.