Still stoic, Rook stood. He hesitated, perhaps wondering if he should say something healing or righteous. While he waited, Heat saw the outline formed by the small square box in his jacket pocket. The wave of anger then mixed with the backwash of shame. The swirl created a sort of undertow, dragging Nikki down. Helpless to do anything but founder, she watched Rook turn and go. An impulse to call out to him came and went because the feeling to attach to the words never materialized.
She had gone too far.
Whatever the evening was to have been, it would now not be. Could not be. That was her dark thought watching him descend the fire escape and disappear rung by rung out of this moment, and perhaps, she wondered, out of her life.
eat got there early and paced the hallway. At 7 A.M. most practices in the medical and professional building weren’t open yet, and when the elevator up the hall finally chimed, it broke the dead silence like a fight bell. Lon King, Ph.D., a psychologist who offered services through the NYPD counseling program, didn’t usually have office hours until nine, and Nikki thanked him for agreeing to meet her. After unlocking his suite, he asked her to hold in the waiting room, then disappeared behind his closed door to prepare as if some magic would be lost if the switching on of lights, the hanging of a jacket, and the adjustment of blinds should be witnessed.
“It’s been a while,” said the shrink when she took her seat on the couch and he settled into his easy chair on the other side of the coffee table.
“Almost two years, I think.” Heat listened to the pillow-soft sounds of York Avenue drifting up twelve floors while she thought about where to begin. She never felt comfortable here. It wasn’t him, she liked Dr. King enough. It was the whole idea of counseling. She had originally come to him against her will when Captain Irons used psych leave as a tool to suspend her without all the nasty paperwork.
Painful as that had been, Nikki found it helpful, and had come back a few times when she felt her compass spinning and needed some guidance. Or solace. As was his way, he sat passively and waited for her. Nikki delivered the opening line she had formulated in the taxi ride uptown. “I’m dealing with a bit of a challenge.”
“I assumed so. If you, of all cops, would ask for this time in the midst of your usual caseload and preparation for a hurricane, it must be quite a challenge.”
“It’s why I hoped to see you early.”
“To fit it in.” He smiled. “Nikki, you do know that I can’t solve your life in fifty-five minutes.”
“Give me sixty. I’m a quick study.”
“Why don’t you begin by telling me about the trigger for this session?”
The shame stirred again. The shame that had become her stalker and kept her tossing in bed until it enveloped her and found its way inside now shifted like a serpent whose scales etched her damaged soul. “I threw a drink in my boyfriend’s face last night.”
King’s reaction was muted. A listener first, the shrink’s countenance matched the ambience of his office: buttery light, placid tones and textures. A neutrality designed to evoke. Personally, he fell on the scale somewhere between taciturn and meditative. But he knew her and, therefore, the significance. “That’s profound. You have spoken in here before about how you prize self-control.”
“I lost it.” She had been eyeing the box of tissues and snatched one.
“Let’s try to understand why.”
“Where do I start?”
“I think you know where.”
And she did. At least she thought she did. So that is where she began, with finding the receipt for the engagement ring and her candidacy for the international task force. “I hid the promotion from him, I guess, because of the proposal I thought was coming, and I knew my travel would be an issue.”
“You didn’t tell Rook.”
“I didn’t think I could.”
“But you also didn’t turn down the promotion.”
Seeing him reflect on that, Nikki started to feel that she had made a mistake coming there. She didn’t care if passing through discomfort was the path, and that the best way out was always through, and blahdy-blahdy-blah. She wanted relief, not more agony. “Let me tell you what else this is all wrapped up in,” she said, hearing a desperation in her eagerness, but feeling the need to be understood.
Heat talked about the case. Not all the details, of course, but the psychologist nodded an awareness of it when she mentioned Keith Gilbert. The crucial thing, she said, was that Rook seemed to be with her, a partner as he always was, right up to when Captain Irons spilled the beans about the task force.
“That was a turning point. From that moment on, it was like he had become an adversary. Not only refuting the evidence I was gathering, but actively working to develop contrary leads for his article.”
“He was on assignment?”
“Yes.”
“On the case you’re working?” She nodded and he asked, “Isn’t that different for you two? Except for those profiles he did?”