"I see."

"Do you?"

"I'm living with her. Kinda hard to miss stuff like that." Now he was pissing me off.

"So what specific kinds of changes have you witnessed?"

"She used to be organized. Careful and specific. Now she's all over the place. It's causing her problems at the department. She's never been wild or unpredictable before. She knows the ropes and plays by the rules. Alexa is brave and has risked her life in the field many times, but as far as department politics, she's always been a team player. Now she doesn't seem to have any early alert warning system. She just does stuff on impulse without regard to consequence. It's getting her into a pile of trouble with Chief Filosiani."

He nodded and then, without warning, asked, "Has your sex life been affected in any way?"

That was a big one. We'd only made love two or three times since she came home from the hospital six months ago. At first I'd thought it was just her headaches and the after-effects of her injury. But now it had become a pattern. We used to make love regularly, but now almost never. I didn't say any of this, afraid to answer. Afraid of what he might tell me. Awkward silence filled the space between us.

"Why did you make this appointment if you won't discuss any of this with me?" he said.

"I think this was a mistake." I looked at my watch and saw him smile slightly, as if my little peek down at the dial was a confirmation of some secret diagnosis he'd already put on me.

"From the little you've said I can't help you much. Maybe your wife shouldn't have gone back on the job so soon. If you could get her to stay home, it might lower her stress level and her symptoms might subside. People with brain injuries are often in a race to get back to normality. They want their old life back. They want it to be the way it was before the injury. By putting everything back the way it was, they think they can accomplish this. They can't."