In Italian, happy. In Spanish, Alegria meant joy. Allegra, the petite raven-haired young woman of twenty, should have been as spirited and confident as she was beautiful. But she was not spirited and joyful. She was very troubled. Maslow felt an unusually deep connection with her and didn't know why. Sometimes he thought she was copying his mannerisms. Her smile and the way she expressed things were oddly familiar. So were some of the stories she told, familiar even though she had not come from here. The way she crossed her legs and pursed her lips when she was angry were particularly disturbing to him. But most disturbing of all was the fact that sometimes she starved herself and sometimes she cut her own flesh.

In their session that day Allegra had told Maslow that in the first moments after she went to work on herself with a razor and watched the blood bubble up out of the cuts on her belly, she felt bliss. Then, nonchalantly, she'd lifted her blouse for him and showed the scars. The sight of so many even rows of red notches scored across her slender torso had made him queasier than anything he'd seen in medical school. She was his charge, his patient, and he was not working quickly enough to stop her. He was particularly chilled by the fact that whole rows of the red seams on her belly were recent, occurring without his knowledge after she'd started seeing him. A few were brand-new. The idea that she hurt herself after sessions with him disturbed him deeply.

That day after showing off her scars, she'd expressed confusion about sometimes caring about her father despite the horrific things he'd done to her. Maslow remarked that children loved their parents no matter what they did. She'd become enraged at him and had left his office in tears. Ever since, he'd been in a panic about what she might do to herself.

He was still worrying about it at seven o'clock when he returned home from work. He lived in a huge sixty-year-old co-op that took up a whole block on Central Park West.