He knew that this supposition contained a certain amount of arrogance. And, he thought it would be a poor idea to underestimate Rumplestiltskin until he knew much more about the man. But he was certain that no patient that he’d ever had in any usual course of analysis would return, bitter and enraged, years later, so changed that they could hide their identity from him. They might return, still inwardly bearing the scars that had caused them to seek him out in the first place. They might return frustrated and acting out, because analysis is not some sort of antibiotic for the soul; it doesn’t eradicate the infections of despair that cripple some people. They might be angry, feeling that they had wasted years in talk and nothing much had changed for them. These were all possibilities, though in Ricky’s nearly three decades as an analyst, few such failures had ever happened. At least not that he knew of. But he wasn’t so conceited to believe that every treatment, no matter how long it lasted, was always completely successful. There were bound to be therapies that were less victorious than others.

There had to be people he hadn’t helped. Or had helped less. Or had lapsed from the understandings that analysis brings, back to some prior state. Crippled again. In despair again.

But Rumplestiltskin presented a far different portrait. The tone of his letter and the message relayed to his fourteen-year-old great-niece showed a calculating, aggressive, and perversely confident person. A psychopath, Ricky thought, giving a clinical term to someone still unclear in his mind. This was not to say that he didn’t think that perhaps once or twice over the decades of his career he hadn’t treated individuals with psychopathic tendencies. But none who had ever displayed the depth of hatred and fixation that Rumplestiltskin did. Yet someone whom he’d treated less than successfully was connected to the letter writer.