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I let that sit. "You could have asked your mother."

"I could have."

"You didn't."

"She does enough." He says it plainly, without any self-pity, as a matter of fact. I look at him across the table and think of every conversation I've ever had with a patient who thought he could just carry it until it healed.

"You're the kind of man who carries things until they break."

"Is that a clinical assessment?"

"It's a personal one." I get up. "Take off your shirt."

His eyebrows go up. The lamp catches the shape of his smile. "Is this the part where you fix it?"

"It's the part where I start. I have lavender hand cream in my bag. Sit up straight, and don't be charming."

"I'm not charming."

"You're doing it right now."

"That's just my face."

"Then turn it the other way."

He laughs and gets up to pull a chair out from the table, turning it so the back is toward me. I go to the hall for my cream. When I come back he's seated in the chair with his back to me, the gray flannel and the T-shirt already off and folded over the arm.

In the lamplight his back is broad and strongly muscled, the long ridges either side of his spine running down into the waist of his jeans. A faint pale line of old freckles scatters across the tops of his shoulders. The left one rides higher than the right. Even from here I can see the knot.

I unscrew the lid and warm the cream between my palms. The kitchen fills with the smell of lavender, the same smell Nell's hall had. For a moment I'm eight years old and barefoot on a porch.

Then I put both hands on his shoulders. He lets out a long, slow breath.

"Tell me when," I say.

"When."

"That wasn't funny."

"It was a little funny."

I find the knot with my thumb, the walnut he described in the cider tent, deep and tight behind the joint. I press into it slowly, sustained, the way I'd press on any patient. It resists me. Under my hands the muscle is hot and hard as a cable. His whole back tightens, then he breathes out through his nose and lets it go a fraction.

"That's it. Breathe out for me."

"I am breathing."

"You're holding. Let it go on the exhale."

He does it again. I feel the knot give a little more. I move my thumb in small circles and then drag it along the edge of his shoulder blade, firm and slow. His head drops forward. He says something under his breath that has nothing to do with the report.

"Is that good?"

"That's terrible. Don't stop."

I laugh. My hands move on, working the long muscle at the side of his neck, then the top of his shoulder, then the band of tight tissue along his spine. His skin is warm under the cream and he smells of cedar and soap and a little of the pancake griddle. I notice that I'm leaning in close, my hip against the back of the chair, my breath moving the short hair at the nape of his neck. He notices. The muscles of his back go taut for a second under my palms.

"Faith's mother," he says.