NATE

I called Maya at twelve-fifteen.

I was in my office, at my desk, with the specific and ordinary arrangement of a man who had returned from a meeting and should have been reviewing the materials that the meeting had generated and was instead sitting with his phone in the specific and immediate way of a man who had a thing to tell and was not going to be productive until he had told it.

She answered on the third ring.

"I'm between patients," she said. "You have four minutes."

Maya was a therapist, which meant she had both the specific and professional calibration of a woman who gave her...