"What if France wants to extradite him?" I challenge Righter. "What if New York allows it?"

"We could cite what ifs until the moon turns blue," he says.

I stare at him with open disdain.

"Don't take this personally, Kay." Righter gives me that pi-ous, sad look again. "Don't turn this into your personal war. We just want the bastard out of commission. Doesn't matter who accomplishes that."

I get up from my chair. "Well, it does matter. It sure as hell does," I tell him. "You're a coward, Buford." I turn my back on him and walk out of the room.

Minutes later, from behind the shut door in my wing of the house, I hear Anna showing Righter out. Obviously, he lingered long enough to talk to her, and I wonder what he might have said about me. I sit on the edge of my bed, utterly lost. I can't remember ever feeling this lonely, this frightened, and am relieved when I hear Anna coming down the hall. She knocks lightly on my door.

"Come in," I say in an unsteady voice.

She stands in the doorway looking at me. I feel like a child, powerless, hopeless, foolish. "I insulted Righter," I tell her. "Doesn't matter if what I said was true. I called him a coward."

"He thinks you are unstable right now," she replies. "He is concerned. He is also ein Mann ohne Ruckgrat. A man without backbone, as we say where I come from." She smiles a little.

"Anna, I'm not unstable."

"Why are we in here when we can be enjoying the fire?" she says.

She intends to talk to me. "Okay," I concede, "you win."

I HAVE NEVER BEEN ANNA'S PATIENT. FOR THAT MAT-

ter, I have never had psychotherapy of any sort, which is not to say I have never needed it. Certainly I have. I don't know anybody who can't benefit from good counsel. It is simply that I am so private and don't trust people easily and for good reason. There is no such thing as absolute discretion. I am a doctor. I know other doctors. Doctors talk to each other and to their family and friends. They tell secrets that they swear upon Hippocrates they will never utter to another soul. Anna switches off lamps. The late morning is overcast and as dark as dusk, and rose-painted walls catch firelight and make the living room irresistibly cozy. I am suddenly self-conscious. Anna has set the stage for my unveiling. I pick the rocker and she pulls an ottoman close and perches on the edge of it, facing me like a great bird hunched over its nest.

"You will not get through this if you remain silent." She is brutally direct.

Grief rises in my throat and I try to swallow it.

"You are traumatized," Anna goes on. "Kay, you are not made of steel. Not even you can endure so much and just keep going as if nothing has happened. So many times I called you after Benton was killed, and you would not find time for me. Why? Because you did not want to talk."

I can't hide my emotions this time. Tears slide down my face and drop in my lap like blood.

"I have always told my patients when they do not face their problems, they are headed for a day of reckoning." Anna sits forward, intensely leaning into the words she fires straight at my heart. "This is your day of reckoning." She points at me, staring. "Now you will talk to me, Kay Scarpetta."

I Wearily look down at my lap. My slacks are speckled with tears and I make the inane connection that the drops are perfectly round because they fell at a ninety-degree angle. "I can never get away from it," I say in despair under my breath.

"Get away from what?" This has snagged Anna's interest.

"What I do. Everything reminds me of something from my work. I don't talk about it."

"I want you to talk about it now," she tells me.

"It's foolish."

She waits, the patient fisherman, knowing I am nudging the hook. Then I take it. I give Anna examples I find embarrassing, if not ridiculous. I tell her I never drink tomato juice or V8 or Bloody Marys on the rocks because when the ice begins to melt, it looks like coagulating blood separating from serum. I stopped eating liver in medical school, and the idea of considering any sort of organ as something for my palate is impossible. I recall a morning on Hilton Head Island when Benton and I were walking on the beach, and the receding surf had left areas of crinkled gray sand that looked remarkably like the lining of the stomach. My thoughts twist and turn where they will, and a trip to France unfolds for the first time in years. On one of the rare occasions when Benton and I ever really got away from our work, we toured the Grands Vins de Bourgogne and were received by the revered domains of Drouhin and Dugat, and tasted from casks of Chambertin, Montrachet, Musigny and Vosne-Romanee. "I remember being moved in ways I can't say." I share memories I did not know I still had. "The light of early spring changing on the slopes and the gnarled reach of cut-back winter vines, all holding up their hands in the same way, offering the best they have, their essence, to us. And so often we don't touch their character, don't take the time to find the harmony in subtle tones, the symphony fine wines play on your tongue if you let them." My voice drifts off. Anna silently waits for me to come back. "Like my being asked only about my cases," I go on. "Only asked about the horrors I see, when there is so much else to me. I am not some goddamn cheap thrill with a screw cap."

"You feel lonely," Anna softly observes. "And misunderstood. Perhaps as dehumanized as your dead patients."

I do not answer her but continue my analogies, describing when Benton and I traveled by train across France for several weeks, ending in Bordeaux, and the rooftops got redder toward the south. The first touch of spring shimmered an unreal green on trees, and veins of water and the bigger arteries aspired toward the sea, just as all blood vessels in the body begin and end at the heart. "I'm constantly struck by the symmetry in nature, the way creeks and tributaries from the air look like the circulatory system, and rocks remind me of old scattered bones," I say. "And the brain starts out smooth and becomes convoluted and crevassed with time, much as mountains develop distinction over thousands of years. We are subjected to the same laws of physics. Yet we aren't. The brain, for example, doesn't look like what it does. On gross examination, it's about as exciting as a mushroom."

Anna is nodding. She asks if I shared any of these reflections with Benton. I say no. She wants to know why I didn't feel inclined to share what seem like harmless perceptions with him, my lover, and I tell her I need to think about this for a minute. I am not sure of the answer.

"No." She prods me. "Do not think. Feel it."

I ponder.

"No. Feel it, Kay. Feel it." She touches her hand over her heart.

"I have to think. I've gotten where I am in life by thinking," I reply defensively, snapping to, coming out of uncommon space I have just been in. I am back in her living room now and understand everything that has happened to me.

"You have gotten where you are in life by knowing," she says. "And knowing is perceiving. Thinking is how we process what we perceive, and thinking often masks the truth. Why did you not wish to share your more poetic side with Benton?"

"Because I don't really acknowledge that side. It's a useless side. To compare the brain to a mushroom in court would get you nowhere, for example," I reply.

"Ah." Anna nods again. "You make analogies in court all the time. That is why you are such an effective witness. You evoke images so the common person can understand. Why did you not tell Benton the associations you are just now telling me?"

I stop rocking and reposition my broken arm, resting the cast in my lap. I turn away from Anna and look out at the river, feeling suddenly evasive like Buford Righter. Dozens of Canada geese have congregated around an old sycamore tree. They sit in the grass like dark, long-necked gourds, and puff and flap and peck for food. "I don't want to go through that looking glass," I tell her. "It isn't just that I didn't want to tell Benton. I don't want to tell anyone. I don't want to tell it at all. And by not repeating involuntary images and associations, I don't, well, I don't…"