Intake

The file is on your chair when you get in, which is how you know Alban Steinhauer wants something.

He never leaves things on chairs. He leaves them with Sylvia at the front desk, clipped and labeled, with a yellow sticky note that says When you have a moment. This one is a thick gray folder with a law firm's letterhead on top, and the sticky note says, in his tidy capitals, 4 P.M. TODAY. COME SEE ME.

You read the first line standing up, still in your coat.

Re: Board-directed psychological evaluation and treatment, Mr. Joachim Vantreight.

You sit down.

Everybody in New York knows the name. You'd have to live in a cave not to. This summer alone, Joachim Vantreight flew a wingsuit off a ridge in Switzerland where it's illegal to fly, put a vintage race car into a barrier at Lime Rock at a hundred and forty miles an hour and walked away from it, and personally guaranteed a bet so large that his own company's stock dropped eleven percent in a day. The tabloids call him the man who can't stop falling. There's a photo of him from the Lime Rock crash that you've seen at least twenty times without meaning to: helmet under his arm, blood on his lip, looking at the camera like it owes him money.

You flip the page. His board has given him until their December meeting to complete an evaluation and begin treatment, or they'll remove him as CEO of the company he founded.

Steinhauer's door is open. He's at his window in shirtsleeves, silver hair perfect, a rowing oar mounted on the wall behind him like a family crest.

"You've read it," he says.

"I've read the first page. Alban, why me? Femke's done more risk-behavior assessments this year than I have."

"Femke's a postdoc. The board's counsel wanted someone licensed, published and discreet." He smiles the warm smile that hired you out of your fellowship five years ago. "You're all three. And they're paying the full evaluation contract up front. That's the floor's rent through spring, Ava. I don't have to tell you what that means for us."

He doesn't. You've seen Sylvia's face when the mortgage statement comes.

"Four o'clock," he says. "Be your usual brilliant self."

At 3:58, the waiting room goes quiet in a way you can hear through your closed door.

You open it. Sylvia is standing behind the front desk with her reading glasses halfway down her nose, not typing. Femke Hasselby has stopped in the hall with a mug in each hand. A woman waiting for Dr. Polglase has lowered her magazine all the way to her lap.

He's taller than the photos. That's the first thing. The second thing is that the photos lied about everything else, because they made him look reckless, and the man standing in your waiting room looks like the most controlled thing you've ever seen. Dark blond hair cut close at the sides. A charcoal sweater, a dark coat, no tie. A thin white scar runs through his left eyebrow. His eyes are gray-green, the color of the river in October, and they go once around the room and land on you and stay.

Behind him, a broad, calm man in a black suit takes a seat by the door as if he's been assigned it for life.

"Dr. Ambery," Joachim Vantreight says.

"Mr. Vantreight. Come in."

He doesn't take the chair you point to. They never do, the powerful ones; it's the first negotiation. He walks to your window and looks down at Seventy-Fourth Street with his hands in his pockets, like he's measuring the drop.

You sit. You don't tell him to. You've learned that too.

"Your board's letter says you're here for an evaluation," you say.

"I'm here because they'll take my company in December if I'm not." He turns around. "I'd rather you knew that up front. Everyone else in my life lies to me. I'd like one room where nobody does. Including me."

"That's a reasonable thing to want in this room."

"Is it?" A corner of his mouth moves. "Then let's start honestly. I don't think anything is wrong with me."

"That's allowed. You don't have to agree with your board for us to talk."

He considers that. Then he sits, finally, in the chair across from you, and leans back, long legs, long hands loose on the armrests, and you feel the room rearrange itself around him.

You go through the standard opening. Confidentiality and its limits. What you'll share with the board, which is less than they want and exactly what he signs. He listens without interrupting, which almost nobody does.

"You read the release," you say, surprised.

"Twice. I read everything I sign." He tips his head. "You're surprised."

"Most people don't."

"Most people have lawyers who read for them. Mine are very good. I still read it." He watches you write a line. "What are you writing?"

"That you read the release."

That gets a real smile, brief and startling, the kind that changes a face from handsome to something you have to look away from.

You ask the intake questions. Sleep, which he doesn't do much of. Alcohol, which he barely touches. "I don't like anything that makes me less precise," he says. Family, where he gives you a sister in Montauk and a mother who died six years ago, and then a pause so small you almost miss it.

"And the summer?" you say.

"The summer." He looks at his hands. "You want to know why a man with everything jumps off a mountain."

"I want to know what you'd want me to know about it."

He's quiet a long moment. The radiator ticks. Somewhere down the hall, Femke laughs at something and stops.

"Everyone I talk to wants something from me," he says at last. "My board wants a stock price. My investors want a story. Women want a photo, men want a check, journalists want a fall. They all smile and tell me I'm right. And then I stand at the edge of something real, and the edge doesn't care who I am. It doesn't flatter me. It's the only honest conversation I get." He lifts his eyes. "That sounds insane out loud."

"It sounds lonely," you say, before you can make it sound like anything else.

He looks at you. Just looks, for a long time, and something in your chest goes very still, the way it does before a fall.

"Nobody's said that," he says quietly. "In eleven years."

You should write it down. Eleven years is a number that matters, and you know it. Your pen doesn't move.

Because you aren't thinking about the number. You're thinking about his voice when he said lonely back to you, low and surprised. You're thinking about the scar in his eyebrow and whether it hurt. You're thinking that you'd like to hear him laugh, and that you'd like to be the reason, and that you haven't wanted anything that simply, or that badly, in a very long time.

None of those thoughts belong to a clinician.

You've been doing this for eight years. You've sat across from people who were charming, people who were cruel, people who were beautiful and knew it and used it like a key. You have never once felt the floor of the work tilt under you.

It's tilting now.

"Dr. Ambery?" he says. Then, his eyes going to the diploma on the wall behind you, softer: "Ava?"

You look at the clock. Four forty. You look at the pad in your lap, at the neat lines you've written and the empty space after eleven years, and you know, with a clarity that feels almost like relief, exactly what you have to do.

You set down your pen.

"Mr. Vantreight," you say. "I need to stop this session."