“It’s not your fault, Tuvok. I’m the catalyst here.”

“But does it not seem to you that the effect should have worn off by now?”

There was a pause. Tuvok could sense her uncertainty, her fear of saying the wrong thing with Ree listening. This close to term, her hormones were intensifying her empathic projections. “After all,” he went on, prompting her, “with the imminent threat to your child gone, should not the impetus for his…protectiveness have subsided as well?”

She responded slowly. “I…assumed it was my anxiety at being held hostage that was feeding back onto him.”

“Except that the one thing he has surely made quite clear to you is that he will not harm your child. Have you not, Doctor?”

“It is my highest priority. The counselor is aware of that.”

Troi gave a heavy sigh. “He’s talked about nothing else for days.”

“As though,” suggested Tuvok, “he has something to prove to you?”

Silence filled the ward for a time. Troi’s emotions were ambiguous. “Tuvok, what are you saying?” she finally asked.

“The fact is, Doctor Ree did not save your first child, did he?”

“It was a spontaneous miscarriage!” Ree cried. “There was nothing I could do. I had no warning.”

“But you did have warning, early in this child’s term. You determined that she would die and might kill the counselor in the process.”

“Yes.”

“Counselor Troi. I would like you to answer my next question. What did Doctor Ree suggest as the solution?”

He felt her anger at him for dredging this up. “He wanted to terminate the fetus.”

“Which you refused.”

“Yes!”

“You could not bear to lose another child.”

“Yes!”

“And you hated him for wanting to kill the child.”

“I—no. No, Ree, I understood.”

“Did you?” Tuvok demanded, letting his own emotions color his voice. “Could any parent truly accept such a suggestion with total equanimity?”

“But the baby’s fine now. The Caeliar saved her.”

“Despite Ree’s best efforts to ensure her termination.”

Ree’s growl sounded from the other side of the door, disquietingly close. Next to him, Tuvok could see Hriss’s fur standing on end. “Commander, you are agitating my patient. I advise you to end this.”

But Tuvok was relentless. “It is not just your fear for your child that is influencing Ree. It is your fear of him. Subconsciously, you resent him for letting one child die and threatening another. As long as that resentment is within you, you are projecting it onto him. Filling him with the perception of himself as a potential child-killer.”

“ No!” Ree cried.

“Yes, Doctor! You prove my point. Do you see, Counselor? To his instincts as a Pahkwa-thanh male, that is intolerable. He is driven to prove himself a worthy caregiver—to prove to you and to himself that he will not let your child down again. As long as your resentment is still inside you, he cannot be free of it—and you cannot be free of him.”

He felt her struggling with it, denying it. “No, Tuvok. No, Ree, I don’t resent you. It was months ago.”

“It was no longer ago than the death of my son,” Tuvok told her. “And that still burns in me as fiercely as ever. That is why I understand the anger and blame you must hold within yourself. Because when a parent loses a child, we need to blame someone. We need to blame the person responsible for their loss.”

He paused, having trouble controlling his voice. This was difficult for him. But it had to be done. “You yourself told me, Counselor…we cannot let go of our anger until we identify its real target. I know now what you were trying to get me to confess. That I…” He glanced over at his team, reluctant to expose himself to them like this. But he saw only trust and support in their eyes. “That I blame Elieth for his own death. That I am angry at him for making the choice that took him from me. Angry at him for causing his mother to endure loss.

“I am ashamed of myself for feeling that. But you sensed it in me, and knew it was important that I face it. If that is so, then you must do the same. As long as we are in denial about our anger, neither of us can let it go.”

He was breathing hard, as though he’d just sprinted up a mountain. He could feel her turning inward, searching her soul. But for a time, there was no sound. He wasn’t sure if he’d done any good. If not, he had humiliated himself in front of his team for nothing.

But then he felt a hesitant pat on his shoulder. He glanced back to see Krotine there. “Whether it works or not, sir,” she whispered, “that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Deanna wept at the surge of emotion coming from Tuvok as he confessed his anger. The flavor of it was agonizingly familiar. She remembered how Counselor Haaj had elicited a similar confession from her, months ago: that she was angry at her first child for leaving her. That she had been afraid to admit it, to face it, because it made her feel horrible about herself. But Haaj had helped her understand, as she had tried to help Tuvok see in turn, that it was a natural, forgivable part of the grieving process.

Yet now Tuvok forced her to confront the possibility that she had not exorcised all her anger after all. Even as she drank in his catharsis, she was compelled to look inward and examine her own soul.

Ree was coming toward her, hands spread placatingly. “Counselor…Deanna…please. You must know I have your child’s best interests at heart.”