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You have a strong suspicion you know who.

He'd give nearly anything for an excuse to do just that.

Because her interest was actually your interest.

Not a direct answer.

A conversation. Fogged Mirror. Two gin cocktails, her regular table.

A dream that tastes like ashes on his tongue just now.

Approval. Pride.

Immediately apparent in the copies she passed you. Annotated, pertinent sections marked with colour-coded flags.

In retrospect, her diligence gave you a false sense of her abilities.

You must understand that, he means, if you're going to understand what happens later.

For his work, he means.

Blank entries in the archive. Impossible to query or cross-reference. A form of willful oblivion.

Politeness, professionalism, the performance of empathy. These are the things he was taught would make a good man, or at least a correct man. In his moment of greatest extremis, they all deserted him.

You gain nothing by making this poor man repeat the words he's most regretted saying in his life.

On the contrary, you gain immense power over him.

Glowing embers of old grudges burn holes in his stomach lining.

That he could clear it all up. That things could go on, as though none of what happened had happened.

Your eye gravitates toward the framed credentials on the wall, the dusty anatomical torso, all of it.

He can't bring himself to use the word 'incarcerated' in the same sentence as his daughter.

They showed him evidence. Irrefutable, damning, and absolutely covered with Karolina's fingerprints.

As was always intended. She was a tool you used to keep your own hands clean.

Better for him that they remain that way. Dark, sticky, unexamined.

Her skin: pale. Eyes: tired. Muscles: atrophying.

A vision of Karolina's home life suddenly flashes before you. Her father -- doting, concerned, overbearing.

The doctor's heart is a snowglobe, a thin glass shell surrounding a moment of perfect pain. You feel it in your hands now.

If you mean to bring KINDRED with you, a clean break is best.

He looks around the houseboat. It feels incomprehensible to him now. How he came to be on it.

Abject disappointment. Her response is all he's been thinking about since he put himself at your mercy.

A weight appears to lift from his shoulders.

That's how she was and remains for him -- a mirror of his own qualities and flaws.

Two utterly banal words, but they're the first he's had of her in ages. He'll hold onto them like prayer beads, until all possible meaning has been rubbed off.

'Doing fine, without you,' is all he hears.

The mirror-world.

Father-rage. Blood rising.

The doctor overtakes the father.

The Sunset is an upper, upper-class district north of Quisach.

A great fall, for someone of his professional stature.

The heavy floorboards are spotted with motor oil and bootprints.

If it's a fairy tale, it's one he's either grown very tired of or never wanted to hear in the first place.

The sort of serene, approachable expression that is considered key to 'good bedside manner'.

The Quisach backways are known more for fly-tipping and feral boars than for 'families'.

Five years ago, he was one of the top experimental somnologists in the Developed World.

Complicated subject matter.

His patients are overwhelmingly canine in nature these days.

Something stirs in you. Bad feel.

Distemper is not a human disease.

IF THE SO-CALLED DEVELOPED WORLD IS REALLY SO DEVELOPED, WHY DO ITS PEOPLE SUFFER FROM DIRTY DOG DISEASES?

He did not directly answer your question.

Skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 70 of 197