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practically verbatim, until finally I talked myself to silence.
    Somewhere in the grid of streets below us, a car cranked up and accelerated away. I listened to its blowing exhaust through two gear-changes before the noise was swallowed up by the background chatter of the city.
    Sean still hadn’t spoken. I listened to the tenor of his breathing and smiled at the ceiling
    “Stop it,” I said.
    “What?”
    “Gloating.”
    “I never said a word.” He did injured innocence rather well. “Did I say a word?”
    I rolled partway back so I could prop onto an elbow and look down at him. “You didn’t have to. I can hear you cackling from here. It’s very juvenile.”
    He grinned outright then, wholly unrepentant. “Well come on, Charlie,” he said, not trying to hide the amusement that glistened in his voice. “Even you have to admit—after all that rampant disapproval—it’s bloody funny to find out your old man’s finally fallen off his high horse.”
    “No,” I said slowly. “That’s the trouble—it isn’t funny. Even if I discounted half the things he said afterwards—”
    “Which you can’t.”
    I let my breath out fast, an annoyed gush. “Yeah, right, that’s easy for you to say. You haven’t spent half your life trying to get his attention and the other half wishing you hadn’t succeeded.”
    “That’s just it,” he said, and he’d matched my tone. “I can view him as an outsider—God knows, he’s always done his damnedest to make me feel that way. He’s a coldhearted bastard at times, but he doesn’t have the emotional capacity to be vindictive. And he’s not a drunk.”
    He tilted his head so I knew he was looking directly at me. I felt the prickle of it across my skin even though I couldn’t see his eyes.
    “Reasons?”
    He crooked one arm behind his neck to support it. “You’re physically fit. We both know that and, hell, he probably knew before we did. Calling you a cripple is gross exaggeration and he’s not a man prone to flights of fancy. So why did he say it? What did he hope to achieve?”
    “O-kay,” I said, reluctantly absorbing his words. “But what about the drinking problem? How can you be so sure about that?”
    He gave a soft, bitter laugh. “My father was a drinker, remember?”
    I’d never met Sean’s father. Long before Sean and I first met, the man had been killed in an inebriated car crash, which wrecked his ambition to die of liver failure at the earliest age possible. By all accounts, he had not been a happy drunk. I squeezed Sean’s arm.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Forget it.” I felt him shrug. “All I meant was, I know the signs and your old man doesn’t have them. Besides, how long do you think he could keep the shakes quiet when he spends every day holding a scalpel?”
    I sank back onto the sheets, frowning.
    “But I heard him admit to it, completely unequivocally, on camera, and it’s the kind of admission that will totally ruin his career—if it hasn’t done already. Why the hell would he say that, if it’s not true?”
    “Seems like he said a lot of things today that weren’t true,” Sean said. “You either accept he’s flipped his lid and we book him a nice padded room at Bellevue, or you go and bully the truth out of him.”
    He paused and, though I couldn’t see his face clearly I could hear by his voice that the smile was back full strength. “After what you did to Nick today, I’d say you’ll have no trouble on that score.”

CHAPTER 4
     
    One of the things I quickly learned to love about New York was Central Park early in the mornings. I ran there, and whenever I could find an excuse, I detoured through it using one of the numerous sunken roads.
    It was extravagance on a grand scale to have such an expanse of carefully created countryside tumbling down the spine of one of the most expensive areas of real estate in the world. Early on, I’d been staggered to discover that the park covered more than eight hundred tranquil