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psychologist-at-large, and I’m the only one around, I’m all over the place. Rockaway yesterday, South Bronx tomorrow. But your F train case is
our
top priority. So you just be sure, absolutely sure, Florence, you only have to whistle and that’s it, I’m running straight over wherever you set it up.”
    “Thanks, Howie. I’ll whistle.”
    Too often she saw the Howard Geralds of this world use truth the way media like the
Post
shaped it, truths splintered into suitable shards to propel a patron’s agenda. Flip gestures, incendiary sound bites, slyly trimmed photos, the shams stirred and spiced a brimming hot pot of grievances. Flo realized the dangers of spewing fractions of truth around a city where four million out of eight million people hung on by their fingertips day after day, consumed in simply surviving. She believed in real truth as a vital principle: she was ready to give her life for it, but only if the truth had a real value.
    Exactly as she’d give her life for her husband or her daughter, she’d risk it for the African American woman slumped dead against the subway car window or wager it for the sake of John James Reilly’s children. All the energies of motherhood harnessed a laserlike intensity in Flo Ott’s determination.
    The great city around her, and her beloved skin-close borough of Brooklyn, this world existed in an incessant, pounding, self-asserting motion like that pneumatic drill penetrating the concrete pavement down below in the street.
    Utterly relentless.
    The disappearance of spouses. Abused bodies of children. The deaths of strangers on the subway.
    For all these truths, Flo was set to work a lifetime.
    But for Howard Gerald, PhD, five minutes handed over to him felt like an eternity wasted, time lost forever.
    Howie Gerald was a jerk.
    He left her office the same way he entered, bouncing out like a beach ball in a suit and tie.
    6:58 P.M.
    From her office, Flo headed straight for the subway.
    She carried Eddie’s supper and in her pocket a thumb drive with all the photos to load on her home computer.
    She rode the Q train headed out to Sheepshead Bay on the south shore of Brooklyn. She sat in the front car and watched the tunnel ahead, twisty and dark, shadowy, unidentifiable shapes looming up, then fading, intermittently illuminated in the sudden flashing of control lights.
    Fast.
    Slow.
    Stop.
    Go
…
    Underground the subway seemed to seal you in stone as tight as a tomb. At an elevated station, Flo left the train and walked down two flights of stairs, heading straight along the Sheepshead Bay harbor-front boulevard to the nursing home.
    A familiar route she’d taken a thousand times. Here the wind whipped in off the bay with a stinging spite, and the sky was black and unyielding.
    She ducked into the nursing home, stamping the slush from her boots. The lobby was warm and cozy. Under the yellow light of a floor lamp, the receptionist at the desk looked up at Flo and smiled. The receptionist was reading the
Post,
open to a two-page color photo spread of seven bodies. Newspapers thought their reporters explained a story, when all they did was tell stories, articles strewn with unsolved details, a kind of journalism of fantastic intimacies.
    “Hello, Mrs. Ott,” the receptionist said. “Rotten night, but you’re looking good. What’s on the menu?” Always kindly, always friendly, the woman at the desk was a good choice for a hard job, welcoming visitors to a house of permanent pain.
    Flo appreciated her greeting. “Fried chicken this evening, and creamed corn and string beans.”
    “That’s wonderful.” The receptionist winked and smiled. “He’ll love it.”
    Flo had made the supper at a quieter moment almost two days before, but now this seemed more like years. She’d packed Eddie’s meal in Styrofoam and kept it cold in her office refrigerator. Flo would heat it all up for him in the microwave.
    Eddie barely whispered when he greeted her. “Honey, what’s