What would people think if they could overhear their own conversations?

“I don’t know how many times I have to explain this. I go to work all day. I’m there . . . all . . . day. If I want to come home, have a beer, watch the tube, and go to sleep, it’s because I’m exhausted. It’s not . . . about . . . you.”

“You love to throw that in my face, don’t you?”

As Helen shifted in her sleek white leather swivel chair to stay alert, she could see herself posting a surreptitiously recorded excerpt of this couple’s therapy session on the Internet. She imagined both husband and wife listening to it online. She pictured them saying to each other, “At least we’re not like that.”

“Seriously, Susan. On what planet did I just throw something in your face?”

“That you work. As if I don’t. You were the one who got out pen, paper, and calculator and figured out that my salary barely covered daycare, not to mention the housekeeper on top of it. So I gave up one job and got two in return, but— no— you’re the one who works all day.”

Helen took a deep, slow breath. It was one of her regular tricks during sessions. Most people didn’t notice. If they did, they’d interpret it as a sign that they should do the same. But what a deep breath gave Helen was a surge of oxygen to keep herself from nodding off. Now where were these two in the volley of husband- wife- husband- wife?

“Fine. You want me to stay home? I will.” Ah, it was the husband’s

“Oh, like you don’t leave the office to work out in the middle of the day. Or drink at lunch. Or come home stinking of booze when you supposedly had a meeting. But that’s right: you’re the one who would kill to have more time with Aidan.”

Helen scrolled through her client notes on the iPad resting on her lap. Aidan: was that a son or a daughter? She couldn’t remember. Call her old- school, but crap if she didn’t miss the days of handwritten notes on lined paper. But the iPad, she’d learned, made her type of patients feel less studied. Less examined. Less broken. An iPad made them feel like they were with their caterer or interior decorator, not a psychotherapist.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Back to the husband again. “I’ve told you— I’m expected to do client development. And, yeah, I exercise. Last time I checked, we belonged to a gym three blocks from the apartment that offers daycare if you’re in such dire need of a break from our child. Maybe then you wouldn’t feel so bad about your body that you won’t let me f— ”

“Don’t you dare, Jack. Don’t you fucking dare.”

“So it’s okay for us to hurl the word at each other when we’re fighting, but God forbid I use it to point out we don’t have a sex life anymore.”

And there it was: sex. There it always was.

Helen knew that sex was only . . . sex. She knew that great sex wasn’t enough to form the foundation of a lifelong partnership. She knew that bad sex could mean anything: a lack of emotional intimacy, an absolute lack of physical attraction, or a “mismatch in activity preferences” as she’d learned to call it, as when one person wanted sweet talk in front of the fire while the other wanted (or needed) the kinds of dirty, dirty things that were legal only because no one had imagined them in time to try to prohibit them.

But no sex? No sex at all between two p eople trying to run a shared household, and raise a child together, and put up with the rest of the world day in and day out without seeking intimacy from another person? Sex couldn’t make or break a marriage, but Helen had learned one thing about sex in fifteen years of marriage counseling: it was a hell of lot easier to put up with another person’s shit when you were having it on a regular basis.

“On that subject,” she interrupted, “when I saw you last week, I suggested that the two of you try to set aside time to work on that aspect of your relationship.” She had the script down pat: reserve time for each other, separate from stress, be your own best people for one another and see what happens. But she, Susan, and Jack all knew what she meant: get down to marital business. “Were you able to do that?”

Silence. Silence, like bad sex, could mean anything.

Helen had two children of her own with whom she’d like to spend more time. Yet here she was, at four- forty on a snowy Sunday afternoon, listening to Jack and Susan West fight. Those names. So perfect, like out of a soap opera. Somehow their appearance matched their perfect names, too. Yet they fought, like almost all of Helen’s patients. They fought about everything— money, work, childcare, jealousies, and, perhaps most of all, betrayal, whether actual or perceived. They fought because life can suck and a lot of p eople needed help to cope with the person who was supposed to help them cope.

The truth was, Helen knew she wasn’t at her best these days in that area. She had forced Mitch, after all, to see one of the city’s most respected counselors, and a year of hard work hadn’t saved their marriage. And so now she and Mitch were paying for two households, which meant money was tighter, which meant she now took weekend appointments, which meant she had to tune back in and pay attention to Jack and Susan and a fight that felt important to them, but which she knew was utterly mundane.

Where were they? Right. The subject of sex, followed by this moment of silence. Helen had been here many times before.

She was about to deliver her typical advice to try again when she saw Susan and Jack exchange a glance and then look away. It was Susan who smiled first, followed by Jack, whose smile turned into a laugh. And then the two of them were laughing together.

“Is this a reluctance to talk to me about your physical life together?” Helen asked. She knew from experience it wasn’t, but she wanted them to choose to share the moment. So many patients came to therapy and spoke only about the worst aspects of their marriage. Discussing the better moments— however rare— helped p eople get past their resentments and visualize the ability to reconnect.

Susan spoke first. “It’s stupid, really. I— I bought lingerie. If you could even call it that. It was— well, it was really tacky.” She looked again at her husband.

“It wasn’t tacky. Okay, it was trashy, but I mean that in a good way.”

“Did you not notice my little home- improvement project yesterday?” Jack asked.

The smile began to fade from Susan’s face. Helen knew that the couple— once again, like everyone else— had a tendency to keep score when it came to household responsibilities.

Jack explained before the tone of the conversation soured. “The door. I put a latch on the bedroom door. I thought you’d notice last night and we’d maybe resume where we left off. When you didn’t say anything— ”

“No,” Susan said, still smiling and blushing. “I totally didn’t notice. Really? You did that?”

Apparently in the bartering economy of the West family, hardware installation was roughly equivalent to trashy lingerie.

Four- forty- eight. Close enough to the fifty- minute mark for Helen, especially when the clients were two seconds away from getting down and dirty. “Why don’t we continue this next week?” If she

made really good time, she’d be home to watch the red carpet coverage with the kids. It was the first Oscar night since the separation and, though the kids hadn’t mentioned it, she knew they’d have something special planned.

Helen was still tapping out her session notes on the iPad when she heard a buzz from the building’s front entrance. Now that money was tighter, she not only had weekend sessions, but she made do without an assistant.

“Yes?” she said through the intercom.

“Dr. Brunswick? I think I left one of my gloves up there.”

She didn’t see a glove on the couch, but she’d allow Jack to search for himself. She buzzed him up, cracked open her office door, and resumed typing. A minute later, she heard the hinges on the door creak.

“I didn’t find it, Jack, but feel free to— ” The man standing in her office wasn’t Jack West.

“Where’s Jack? Sir, you need to go right now. See this?” She touched her iPad screen. “I just alerted security. They’ll be here in seconds. You really should go.” Would the man know she was bluffing? She thought she sounded firm, or had her voice quaked?

“You don’t even recognize me?”

All these years, she had listened to normal, ordinary people like Susan and Jack West dissect every moment of their normal, ordinary lives for a reason: because she had Jessica and Sam, and she used to have Mitch. She had a family to go home to. She had a life she loved. As fascinated as she was by p eople with more serious troubles, she had learned she didn’t want her own thoughts to live among theirs. She wanted her thoughts to be as normal and ordinary as she could keep them.

But now this man— this stranger— was in her office, and she knew she was looking at the face of hopelessness. And then she saw the gun.