Christmas came and went, a wreckage of canceled play dates and parties. No one visited. The kids down the street Kit played with were not invited into the house. The new skis leaned in a corner, barely unwrapped. Without water, decorated halfheartedly by Broker and Kit, the magnificent tree dropped needles and shriveled to brown tinder. Nina stopped running in the morning, quit her exercises. She ate and talked little. Mainly she slept.

Broker hovered. He monitored the pills in the bathroom cabinet and the knives in the kitchen. Finally, Nina surfaced through the oceans of exhaustion long enough to tug his arm and say, “We gotta talk.”

They sat down on a chilly gray overcast afternoon bundled in fleece and parkas at the picnic table in the backyard, overlooking the color-drained St. Croix River valley. Kit stood motionless, hugging herself on the back porch. Watching them through the windows.

They made up their minds in less time than it takes to play a game of checkers. Broker did most of the talking. Nina, in the grip of the thing that had captured her, refused to speak its name.

“You trust me on this?” Broker asked. She nodded and continued to nod as he frankly ticked off the signs. They both had been brushing up on the relevant chapters in the DSM-IV. She had lost interest or pleasure in nearly all activities. He saw insomnia, decreased energy, and fatigue, along with a diminished ability to think or concentrate, irritability, and guilty preoccupations with past failings. And she’d basically ignored her daughter and her husband. He finished up by saying, “We gotta get you away from-”

She nodded again and said, “People.”

“What about the doc at Bragg you check in with?” he asked.

Nina shook her head vehemently. “Not a word about…this thing. He knows how serious the shoulder is. Time’s not a factor. I’m not exactly under discipline anymore, am I? I’m technically a ‘contractor.’” She managed a bitter twitch of a smile.