Mary graciously agreed to evaluate Mrs. Miller later that afternoon. Mr. Miller had driven his wife the few blocks over to Mary’s office directly from mine, and I’d never seen the Millers together again.

Months later, at a summer party at a mutual friend’s house, Mary Black had suggested to me-“You know that woman you referred to me? The wedding woman?”-that Mrs. Miller’s care had quickly degenerated into a carousel of poor treatment compliance, failed trials of conventional drugs and the newer atypical antipsychotic compounds, and repeated short-term, stabilizing, acute hospitalizations.

The wedding planners and pastors and ministers and rabbis in town knew all about Mrs. Miller by then. Ushers at virtually every wedding ceremony in the county carried an eight-by-ten glossy of her in full nuptial regalia, and after six months of futile mental health treatment she was being turned away at some church or synagogue door almost every Saturday.

It was precisely the kind of outcome that I had feared.

When she was done telling me the story of what had happened to Mrs. Miller, Mary Black told me one other thing. She said, “I don’t think my husband would stand by me the way her husband has. It’s inspiring. Truly inspiring. The things he’s done for her…”

Mary’s eyes told me something else: that she knew that I knew that I owed her one.

Bill Miller came back to see me a little over a year later. It was the January right after the horrid Christmas when Boulder ’s little blond beauty queen had been discovered dead in the basement of her home. Bill and I met for only a few minutes, maybe fifteen. He’d asked for the time so that he could thank me for my help with Rachel. I’d told him, honestly, that I didn’t think I’d done much.

Although he’d suggested that his wife’s treatment with Mary Black hadn’t gone particularly well-and explained that he and Rachel were temporarily separated-he didn’t offer any details and I didn’t ask for any. We talked briefly about the Christmas-night murder of the little girl, how hard it was for his kids, and he asked me whether I’d noticed the story in the Camera about the young orthodontist who’d been hit by a car and killed a few days before Christmas near Chatauqua. I said I had. He told me he’d witnessed the accident, and I wondered briefly if that traumatic experience was why he had come back in to see me.

But as I waited for Bill to irrigate that wound, he moved on. He said that he and the kids were coping, and he made a particular point of explaining how well things were going for him at work-he’d just been promoted to a post he’d always coveted-as though he wanted to emphasize for me that, despite his wife’s illness and his marital problems, his family life hadn’t totally fallen apart.

Although I don’t really remember, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that I had ended the session with some generalized offer of future help, something like, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

He’d probably said, “Thank you,” and that had been that.

“The girl was anxious about the holidays? And she misses her mother? That’s what the session she had with Hannah was about? That’s it?” I said to Diane.

“No. No, that’s not all of it,” Diane said. “Come on, I’m doing this from memory. It was no big deal at the time. I didn’t take any notes. The whole consultation lasted five minutes, maybe. God, I should write things down. I just should.”

“What do you remember?”

“The girl told Hannah that her mother has a severe mental illness and had left Boulder years ago. The girl doesn’t talk to her much, misses her. Hannah was speculating about the mother having bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, but she didn’t really have enough information. She was worried about the girl developing symptoms.”

I wanted to tell Diane that I already knew the details. I wanted to tell her about all the weddings that Mrs. Miller attended, about the lovely bonnets and the QVC gifts, and about the delusions, and the voices. I wanted to tell her that at the time I did my eval that I thought Hannah was right about the schizophrenia, wrong about the bipolar disorder.

Instead I said, “You can’t tell anybody, Diane. You can only divulge the fact that this girl saw Hannah for psychotherapy if you have reason to suspect that there has been, or is likely to be, child abuse. Otherwise the privilege holds.”

“But she can’t seek care without a parent’s permission until she’s fifteen.”

“You’re sure about that?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Diane was often sure about things that turned out not to be true, but I suspected she was right about that one. “Even if it’s true, I don’t know whether that would abrogate her privilege.”

“But it might.”

“You’re not even sure it was really Mallory. You’d have to violate privilege even to be certain. God knows there would be lawyers involved, and once there are lawyers involved, anything can happen. Either way, the privilege won’t evaporate today. If they started litigating this tomorrow you wouldn’t have an answer before next year’s aspen season. You know lawyers better than I do.”

“What do you mean? You’re married to one, while I”-she paused for effect-“am married to a Mediterranean god.”

I decided not to take that detour with her.

“What if she’s dead?” Diane asked.

Shit. “Diane, do you know that she’s-”

“No, no, I don’t. I don’t. But if she were, if that was determined, I was wondering if I could-”

“No, you couldn’t-confidentiality survives death. Well, actually you’d have to tell her parents if they asked, because they would probably have control of her estate, which includes all her medical records, but-”

“Why would they ask? If they didn’t know she’d been in treatment, why would they ask?”

“Exactly.”

Diane and I had been partners longer than Lauren and I had been married. I wasn’t surprised that we were finishing each other’s thoughts. But the ping-pong nature of the conversation we were having felt awkward to me. Why? I suspected that each of us was in possession of some information that we weren’t sure how to handle, information we didn’t want to keep to ourselves, but information we weren’t at all sure we were permitted to share.

“The girl also told Hannah-”

“Wait, I want to do this face-to-face. I have a patient late this afternoon at the office. I’ll come downtown. You available?”

She sighed. “I was just about to head out to the after-Christmas sales on the Mall. Things are going to get really picked over if I don’t get down there soon.”

After-Christmas shopping on the Pearl Street Mall? I would have preferred to be strapped into a chair and serenaded by The Captain and Tennille.

“With Raoul?” That was wishful thinking on my part. The worse the party, the more grateful I was for Raoul’s company. After-Christmas shopping on the Mall sounded like a very bad party.

“Shopping? With me? Are you kidding? He won’t shop with me.”

There was a caution there I knew; Raoul was a wise man. I swallowed a sigh. “Okay, where do think you’re going to be? I’ll meet you someplace.”

The little office building that Diane and I owned together was an architecturally pedestrian-certainly not a painted-lady-early-1900s Victorian house on the west end of Walnut, a couple of blocks from the Pearl Street Mall. The odds of finding street parking in downtown Boulder during the closeout-sale-frenzied week between Christmas and New Year’s were about the same as the odds of being eaten by a great white shark, so Diane was planning to stash her Saab behind our building and start her quest for bargains near Ninth and Pearl on the west end of downtown. Since I had a patient to see, I told her I’d park at our offices, too, and suggested we rendezvous outside Peppercorn at three.