He looked at his watch and frowned. He’d just been shopping. Why hadn’t he remembered beer? It was a little after seven, which meant that the Safeway in the basement was closed, and that if he wanted beer, he’d have to walk to the 7-Eleven. The thought made him queasy, as if in the corner of his eye he’d seen something skitter under the couch. Something dark and fast. A toxic sensation passed through him like a chill.

With a sigh, he removed the Pinot Grigio from the refrigerator, pulled the cork, and poured himself a glass. Then he pushed the button on the telephone that automatically dialed Chiang Mai Garden. He gave his order, and the man on the other end converted it.

“One numbah foh, one numbah twenny-two. Very good. Fifteen minute!”

He tried to tell himself that wine was just as good with Thai food as beer. But the truth was, it wasn’t. As good as the Pinot Grigio was, he could almost taste the cold, hoppy beer that he longed for.

It was only three blocks to the 7-Eleven. He ought to go, but… This is ridiculous, he thought. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he sipped his wine and shook his head.

Had he always been like this?

No. At least, he didn’t think so.

Since when, then? When had it begun?

He ministered to people with cognitive problems so he knew his own symptoms well enough. According to the DSM-IV, he suffered from agoraphobia. Or to be exact, because agoraphobia itself was not codable, he suffered from the malady listed in the DSM-IV as 300.27: Agoraphobia with panic disorder. Situations are avoided or endured with marked distress.

In its most debilitating form, agoraphobes were prisoners of their fears, unable to venture out of their homes. Duran’s malady was less severe. If the need was great enough, he could resist it. He could go out, and he did. But less and less frequently, it seemed, and never with much enjoyment. In point of fact, if he were not living and working in an “urban village” like the Capitol Towers, the phobia might have been crippling.

So it worried him. And not just the phobia, but the way he was handling it. In essence, he was ignoring the problem because it made him uncomfortable to think about it—which was ironic, given his profession. Indeed, it made him wonder if he was even functional. Could a therapist live an unexamined life, and still help others? Did he have any business dealing with patients as disturbed as Nico and de Groot? He drained the wine and poured himself another glass.

A voice in the back of his head whispered, Therapist, heal thyself. And a second voice replied, Later…

Nico’s sister, Adrienne, had made a pact with the Devil. It was as simple as that.

Having graduated from Georgetown Law the year before, she’d made a Faustian bargain with Slough, Hawley, in the interests of paying down a mountain of student debt. In return for a whopping salary and the inside-rail on what everyone said was “the fast track,” Adrienne was expected to work eighty-hour weeks, doing mostly shitwork, in what amounted to a two-year bootcamp for baby lawyers. If, at the end of this period, she was still “viable”—which is to say, neither burned out nor canned—she’d be named an associate. Whereupon, things would get a lot easier, or if not easier, at least more interesting.

For now, however, life was hell. That was the deal.

At the moment, she was working on a memo for Himself. This was Curtis Slough, the name partner who was supposed to be her mentor, and the only one for whom she actually did any work. The client was Amalgamated Paving, a Maryland-based company in the business of building parking lots and roads.

Four years earlier, Amalgamated had been sued by the District of Columbia, which contended that its work on the 14th Street Bridge had been shoddy. Specifically, the pavement had begun to crumble only six months into a projected, ten-year life span. Large and dangerous potholes had opened up, causing accidents and letters to the editor. Litigation was inevitable.

When the District filed suit against Amalgamated, Slough, Hawley countered on behalf of the beleaguered paver by filing a continuum of hopeful motions. Each of these was accompanied by a memorandum of law in which it was argued that the facts did not entitle the plaintiff to relief. That the roadway had crumbled was not at issue; it was a mess. But it was not (necessarily) Amalgamated’s mess. In the considered view of Slough, Hawley the fault rested not with their client, but with the subcontractors and suppliers whose work and materials had been inferior. Or, if that could not be shown, then the fault might be attributed to an Act of God, i.e., to the weather (which everyone agreed had been harsh and bizarre), and/or to an unexpected increase in traffic. Finally, it was suggested that the blame might be ascribed to the salt used by the District’s road crews—an unusually corrosive formula whose impurities ate into the asphalt’s binder and destroyed “the integrity of the road.” That, in short, was the firm’s position: one of the above.

Which is to say, they hoped to settle. But after four years of legal maneuvering, the District’s attorneys had yet to budge—and the judge had had enough. A court date had been assigned. There would be no further delays.

Panic had ensued.

And so it fell to Adrienne to assist the firm’s namesake, Curtis Slough. She’d spent two weeks assembling a document database, spending day and night with a team of paralegals, poring over thousands of documents: memos, reports, correspondence, receipts, and invoices. It was mindnumbing work. Each piece of paper had to be read and categorized, after which it could be stamped with a number and logged in.

Now, they were in the last stages of discovery, and quarreling over which documents should be released to opposing counsel. Some materials were attorney-client work product or proprietary secrets and, as such, privileged from disclosure. But others were not so easily protected, and it was Adrienne’s task to identify those, and then to suggest ways in which problematical documents might yet be withheld.

Using her desktop computer, she typed in the corrections that she’d made in pencil on the rough draft of the memo she was writing. Then she added the references that she’d gleaned from Lexis, and read it over. There were typos all over the place. She was used to working on a laptop, and much preferred its keyboard to the clunky device in her office. But fixing the typos was easy with the spell-checker, and when it was done, she saved the file, hit the Print button, and sat back. As the memo rolled out, she sat back in the chair and closed her eyes…

So nice… to just…

Her eyes flew open. Yesterday, she’d pulled an all-nighter and, if she didn’t watch out, she’d zonk out, there and then. The night before, she’d been working at home, almost finished with the memo, when her laptop crashed, wiping out hours of work. She’d ended up going to the office at midnight, where she’d finished the memo on her desktop machine. Now, what she really wanted to do was to go home, soak in the tub until the water cooled, and air-dry on her big, soft bed.

But… no. It was the second Tuesday of the month, and after the message Nikki had left on her phone, there was no way she could bag their dinner together.

Sitting up in her chair, she stapled each of the four copies of the memo, and glanced through it one last time, looking for errors. There were three copies for Slough, and one for her file. She hit the speaker button, and tapped the great man’s extension, but of course he was gone, along with the secretaries and just about everybody else. So she put the memos into an interoffice envelope and headed upstairs.