Inside, a thin, dull-eyed correction officer told me to take off my belt and jacket and put them in one of the lockers. I sat on one of the bucket chairs fixed to the floor in the waiting area with a knot of visitors-mostly women and children who looked as if they knew this ritual well. On the hour, a shift of visitors drifted out, a couple joking idly with the officers.

The entrance to the visiting room was a cage with red barred doors on two sides. Visitors had to walk into it and have the door locked behind them before the guards released the other. They weren’t taking chances. Before I entered the cage, an officer stamped the back of my hand with a small green circle.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Ultraviolet,” he said, shining a flashlight on it to light it up. “We don’t want the wrong guy leaving.”

The visiting room was large and dimly lit, with long trestle tables running its length. Each table had a Perspex screen in the middle, perforated with holes to let through the sound of voices. Prisoners in yellow jumpsuits with VISITING written in black on the back sat on the stools on one side, awaiting their visitors. As wives and girlfriends approached, they stood up to hug or kiss them briefly before sitting again. I didn’t see Harry at first, but then I spotted him in the far corner, away from the others, sitting on a stool by himself and looking toward me with a placid expression on his face. A bulky officer stood by him, like his personal bodyguard, as I walked over to greet him. He stayed seated, as he’d done on his lawn two weeks previously, but thrust up one hand over the Perspex to shake mine.

“Hello, Doctor. Sorry about this,” he said, pointing across at the other inmates. “Not much privacy here.”

“It’s all right, Mr. Shapiro. How are you?”

“You know. Keeping busy.”

I looked at him through the screen. It was only the fourth time I’d seen him, but it felt as if our relationship had lasted months. I’d have said that we’d become intimate except that he’d so obviously deceived me. We were also back together in an institution, this time with him in a yellow uniform instead of blue. Since his arrest ten days before, he seemed to have changed in a way I hadn’t expected. I’d imagined that he would be feeling desperate and unhappy, but the tightness in his jaw had gone, his eyes were alert, and his skin was ruddy. Despite having been detained for murder, he looked better.

I’d put in my request to see him as soon as he’d been arraigned. An all-star legal team and an offer of $20 million bail had not been enough to win him release. The correctional facility was to the rear of the Suffolk County Court, where serious crimes on Long Island were tried. It was an enormous holding pen for those in criminal purgatory, awaiting trial or a jury’s verdict. To my surprise, the request had been promptly approved and I had been given a time the following week. Harry wanted to see me.

Perhaps he craves a familiar face, I’d thought on the drive. A media frenzy had erupted since the killing, and every paper and cable show was full of speculation and opinions about Harry’s fate. The fact that a Wall Street baron had been arrested for murder rather than a white-collar crime had provided the public spectacle that people craved as revenge on all bankers. I’d informed the jail that Harry was my patient and he seemed to have played along with that, but I didn’t believe it was true any longer. I knew that he’d see a jail psych to get his meds-he had no need for me.

Yet I felt we were now kindred spirits: he was locked up and I was in limbo. The explosion of Greene’s death had been succeeded by an eerie calm. When I’d arrived on Monday at Episcopal, having watched people around me on the 6 train reading about Harry on the front page of the Post, it felt like a forbidden topic. The others were surely talking about it behind my back, but no one dared mention it to my face. The most honest was Maisie, who hailed me with a sympathetic look and a “How are you doing?” that sounded genuine.

Jim Whitehead had finally made clear what everyone else was thinking when, unable to take it any longer, I walked into his office after lunch.

“Ben. How are you?” he said.

When Dr. Formality used my first name, it had to be bad.

“I’ve been better,” I said.

“Has Mrs. Duncan spoken to you yet?”

It was evident from the way he said it that they’d discussed the case. She’d be the one to let me know the hospital’s verdict.

“No one’s said anything.”

“Well,” he said, standing to head off the possibility of a long conversation, “I believe she’ll be in touch.”

With that, the Episcopal omerta had resumed and I’d reached Friday without anyone uttering a word. Even Steve, when I’d called him, had no parties to offer for the weekend. I was left to myself, thinking over the previous week and seeking the clues that I’d missed. If Harry had planned to kill Greene all along, he’d done a good job of hiding it, or I was incompetent. I preferred a third possibility, although it didn’t reflect well on me either-that he hadn’t known what was on his mind until he’d confronted his victim. That wasn’t much better, but at least it wouldn’t make me feel such a fool.

“You look well. How are the conditions?” I said.

Harry chuckled at the question as if he were holed up in summer camp rather than a jail. “It’s not like being in my own bed, but I’ve made the best of it. The other guys on the tier treat me okay. I’m spending time in the gym.”

This was a change from the Harry of York East. That bed hadn’t been good enough for him although it was the best we offered, yet a jail mattress was fine.

“I wanted to see how you were, after all that’s happened.”

“I’m good. No need to worry about me.”

I was finding the conversation unreal. Not only were we glossing over the fact that Harry had just killed someone, but his mood had changed entirely. An enormous weight seemed to have been lifted from him. He’d been shattered by losing his job, but the likelihood of spending the rest of his life in jail didn’t appear to bother him. I glanced at the officer, but he was looking at the gray sky through the room’s high window and didn’t seem to be listening. All the same, I leaned forward and spoke quietly, my breath misting a patch around the Perspex holes.

“Mr. Shapiro, I must ask … Did you kill Mr. Greene?”

Harry didn’t hesitate or bother to keep his voice down. “I did,” he said, nodding calmly. “I was angry. I lost control. He called me that morning, said we needed to talk about something. I was in the city, but he made me anxious, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I told him I’d drive out there.”

“What did Mrs. Shapiro say about that?”

“I didn’t tell Nora. I knew she’d try to stop me. You’d got her so worried, she didn’t trust me.”

With good reason, I thought. Nora had promised me that she’d keep an eye on Harry, yet she’d let him escape and kill someone. I remembered her telling me in the psych ER that she’d keep the gun out of Harry’s way, the shock and unhappiness etched on her face. She’d said the same thing when I’d asked again in East Hampton. Absolutely, she’d assured me. I’d trusted her, but she’d let me down.

“You met at your house?”

“He said they were taking the Gulfstream away and they weren’t going through with the settlement we’d agreed upon. He was getting heat from Washington, he said. It didn’t look good. He was a coward-he wouldn’t stand up for me. I was mad at him.”

“So you shot him? Just like that?”

Harry rubbed the palm of his right hand up and down a couple of times on the surface of the table, his knuckles flexing. He gazed at me and there was no longer any fire in his eyes, not even an ember. The life that had once been there had died along with Greene.

“I wasn’t acting normally, you know that. Those pills you gave me affected me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was crazy.”