It was the tabby’s purr again, vibrating gently against my fragile heart. I stood and stepped down the church steps. My feet felt like they were disappearing into sand. Lifting them-left, right-took extraordinary effort.

I made her feel safer.I made her feel something good.

I made her feel.

“Call me Sam” was what I said. Or just call me glib. Was I tempted? Yeah. Heading back to Colorado’s high country to play bodyguard to Gibbs’s princess sounded just fine to me. The impulse to go felt wrong. It did. But the sense that it was wrong came and went fast, like the roar of a passing stock car.

A homeless guy was sitting hunched over in the recessed doorway of a building just a few yards from the church steps.That,I thought,is what hope looks like as it’s dying.

I tried, but I couldn’t pry my eyes off him.

As a way to break free from the suction of his gravity, I pulled out my wallet and fished out ten bucks. I dumped the bill into the hat that sat upside down between his antique Air Jordans. He didn’t even look up to check the identity of his benefactor, but a remarkable sleight of hand allowed him to suck the bill up into the sleeve of his ratty corduroy coat so fast that my eye lost track of the money.

I realized that quick-as-a-burp he’d replaced the ten with a single and that I’d been had. I hadn’t contributed some needed charity to a homeless man, I’d made an unwitting payment to a skilled urban busker.

Gibbs broke into my reverie. “Detective?” she said. “Sam?”

She called me Sam.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“If I decide to move somewhere else, I’ll call you from Vail or wherever I am. I hope you have something for me when we talk again.”

Me too. Me too.“Me too,” I mumbled.

“I can pay you, you know, to protect me. I can. I’d like you… here.”

“That’s not it,” I said. “I’m working on something here that might help.”

She sighed. “ ’Bye, Sam.”

“ ’Bye.”

Where was I planning on finding whatever information it was that I planned on giving to Gibbs? That I didn’t know.

I found myself again distracted by the costumed magician who had my hard-earned money up his sleeve. An elegant, elderly woman wearing a fox stole walked by, slowed, and threw a handful of coins into his hat. For a brief moment his hand hovered above the money. But her contribution apparently didn’t equal the price of admission; this guy granted no magic show for a mere handful of change.

Then I remembered: Alan wanted me to call him back. It was just as well that I’d forgotten. If I’d remembered, I would have had to make a conscious decision not to do it. Then I would have ended up feeling guilty. And that would have been bad for my heart.

I pulled a five out of my wallet, folded it the long way into a V, and slid it into the magician’s hat. Faster than my eyes could follow, the bill was gone and replaced in the hat by a solitary buck.

The surrogate bill wasn’t folded down the middle.

I took a step back and applauded quietly and politely, as I might if I attended the symphony, which I don’t.

The homeless impersonator lifted his head an inch or two and mimed a tip of the hat for me.

All in all, it hadn’t been a bad way to spend fifteen dollars.

Despite Tayisha’s reassurance that my office was clean, I made the stroll to the waiting room to retrieve my four o’clock without feeling a whole lot of confidence in the sanctity of my workspace.

My four o’clock was the twenty-three-year-old named Craig Adamson who had called earlier in the week to confirm his appointment. Craig was one of those patients who kept me up late trying to find ways to help him. He was a terrific human being who spent every waking moment battling a whammy of mixed character pathologies-a moderate obsessive/compulsive disorder alongside a severely paranoid character. In his unfortunate circumstances the two problems coexisted about as well as quarreling neighbors. The DSM diagnostic code that I’d cobbled together to describe his condition looked like a European phone number-way too many digits-because it required that I tack on additional numerals to account not only for his depression but also for his occasional psychotic interludes.

A surprise greeted me as I opened the door to the waiting room. Craig was right where I expected to find him: in the corner chair, which was the location farthest from any other seat in the room. But sitting closest to the door was another patient of mine, one who didn’t even have an appointment that afternoon. It actually took me a moment to recognize her. She’d dyed her hair so that it was a shade of red that nature tended to reserve for flowers and fruits, and she’d cut it short enough that she wasn’t going to need a blow dryer for a while.

Sharon Lewis.

She shot to her feet, glanced at the hypervigilant man in the corner-apparently concluding that he wasn’t much of an adversary-and with enough pressure in her voice to power a hydraulic lift, she announced, “I need a minute. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I just do.” Then she squared and faced Craig. “May I have five minutes with him? I know it’s rude, but this is an emergency. You don’t mind, do you?”

Without waiting for either of us to reply, she squeezed past me into the hallway that led back to my office and disappeared from view.

Craig was having a difficult time comprehending what had just happened. I couldn’t blame him for that. Finally, he said, “It’s okay. Really.” But his eyes were jumping with incipient panic.

“It’s not okay,” I told him. “This time is yours.”

Despite a daily cocktail of psychotropic medications prescribed by a psychiatrist who knew what she was doing, and despite twice-weekly psychotherapy with me, Craig remained one of the most disturbed patients I’d ever tried to manage in outpatient therapy. I’d begun seeing him as a favor to my neighbor Adrienne, who worked with Craig’s parents, both local anesthesiologists. They thought I would be the ideal therapist to treat their son, one, because I wasn’t a colleague of theirs, and two, because my office was only a little more than a block from the town house they rented for Craig on West Pearl Street. Craig’s pathology severely limited the geographic territory in which he felt comfortable traveling.

Sharon Lewis could not have picked a more vulnerable person to intrude upon if she had plotted her assault on my waiting room for weeks.

“No, no,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ll wait. She needs… it… you… more than I do. I’ll wait-wait here.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. Not even a glance.

“I’ll take care of this as quickly as I can.”

“Fine. Fine.” Exhale. “Fine, fine, fine.”

“I’ll be right back out,” I said. A blind person could have read his body language. Craig was anything but fine.

He stuck his face closer to his magazine. I noticed that he was readingPopular Mechanics. It wasn’t a title that Diane and I supplied to the waiting room, which meant that he had brought it along with him. It could have been, of course, that he wasn’t fond of any of the magazines we provided for the waiting room. But I suspected the reality was that Craig wasn’t comfortable picking up a magazine not knowing who might have touched it before him.

Would he admit that to me? Not yet. But we’d been making progress on the trust issue lately. Progress that I was afraid this event might annihilate.

Sharon Lewis was waiting on my sofa. She appeared as though she’d been hooked up to a Starbucks IV for most of the day. Her acute agitation made me think of Lauren’s recent Solumedrol jolt.

“I should just go back to Ontario and hide.”

“Ontario? California?” I felt an imperative to adjust my therapeutic gyroscope. Asking an inane question or two would buy me a few seconds of calibration time.