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“I don’t want you quoting me to her, Matt. I’d like your word on that.”

“Sure.”

“Your sister is a fine psychiatrist and a fine teacher. Perhaps for that reason I was terribly disappointed in just about everything she had to say, and certainly with her theories. They weren’t at all professional-although she is so good that some details were valid-but rather the near maternal musings of a loving sister. Furthermore, she should have known that, and that you should not even think about treating someone you deeply care for. It clouds the judgment. In this case, spectacularly.”

“You’re saying she’s wrong about everything?”

“Just about everything.”

“She makes a lot of sense to me,” Matt said. “So what do you think is wrong with me?”

“I told you when I first came in here. You’re like a thoroughbred racehorse. You think you have a bottomless pit of energy from which to draw strength, physical and emotional, and that you’re unstoppable. You don’t and you are.”

“I’ve found out that I’m stoppable, Dr. Stein. Did she tell you how I came apart?”

Matt mimed the rising of his trembling hand and slapping it down.

“In detail. Including how you wept and allowed yourself to be comforted as she held you like a mother. In short, Superman, you showed typical symptoms of emotional exhaustion. The treatment is basically rest and the admonition ‘Don’t push yourself so hard from now on.’ ”

“That’s all?”

“I think you ought to see Dr. Michaels a couple of times. He said he’d be happy to, and you won’t be the first cop he’s talked to about something like this, because you are by no means the first cop something like this has happened to.”

“Come in, Doctor,” Aaron Stein said to Amy Payne. “We have to discuss the patient in 1411, and your relationship with the patient.”

“What did Keyes Michaels have to say?” Amy asked.

“Dr. Michaels and I agree the patient was suffering from understandable emotional exhaustion, from which he-being of sound mind and body, so to speak-will recover rapidly with no lasting ill effects.”

“Well, I don’t agree with that, Aaron.”

“As his attending physician, and after consultation with Dr. Michaels, I have decided that further hospitalization is not indicated, and I have ordered his release.”

“Without consulting me?”

“That brings us to that, Doctor,” Stein said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re Matt’s sister, Amy, not his physician. You seem to have forgotten that. It’s unethical-not to mention stupid- for a physician to treat anyone with whom the physician has a familial or other emotional connection. It clouds the judgment. You know that. Or at least knew it. You seem to have forgotten.”

“All right,” she said after a moment. “I was wrong. Sorry.”

“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Physician, heal thyself,’ Doctor?”

“Of course I have.”

“Would you be interested in my advice in how you can do that, Doctor?”

“I’d be interested to know what you think it is that needs healing, Doctor,” Amy said, growing angry.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll give you the formulation I would recommend, and from that, if you’re half the intelligent, dedicated psychiatrist I think you are, you’ll be able to deduce what I think is wrong with you.”

“Please do, Doctor.”

“Marry the cop, Amy. Have a baby. Have several babies.”

She looked at him in genuine shock.