Jack McCoy opened his desk drawer and fished out a bottle and one glass. "The case will be done soon, Mrs James," he said.

"I know," Colleen said. Tears threatened, and she fought them down. As hard as it had been at home while she was working on the eighth floor, the past five weeks had been the first time since she had started working at One Hogan Place when she had been able to step into the elevator and know, absolutely know, that for the next eight hours she wouldn't see or hear Dan.

And he wouldn't see or hear her. Wouldn't find something, somehow, that she'd said or done that made him suspect her of …

Of what, he never quite said. Just that she needed to be smarter, needed to be more careful, needed to prove to him that he could trust her.

One more week, perhaps two if she was lucky, and the case would be done.

McCoy put his elbows on his desk and rested his chin on his hands. "Mrs James," he said. "Is there somewhere you can go? A friend? Family?"

She knew she should say Why would I need to go anywhere? Should say Everything's fine at home. It was none of Jack McCoy's business, anyway. It was her personal, private life. What went on between a husband and wife in their own home was nobody's business but their own. That was what the right to privacy meant. And if she had been about to talk about what her marriage was like, it would be to a friend, to her sister — not to McCoy, who was nobody but one of the ADAs whose handwriting she deciphered.

Nobody but the man who thought it was worth knowing whether or not she liked chocolates, who had called her an untapped resource and who had slipped her a mimeographed leaflet she would never dare to use.

Colleen opened her mouth, and then closed it. She shook her head.

"No one?"

Colleen picked at a ragged cuticle. "I worry … what might happen to them."

"You mean, what he might do to them," McCoy said.

She looked at him mutely.

"Hold him responsible for what he does, Mrs James," McCoy said. "Even if only in your own head."

"If I leave, he'll kill me," she whispered.

His face was kind, but his voice was implacable. "He might kill you if you stay."

Hearing it out loud she began to cry. McCoy didn't comfort her, or try to take it back. He sat on the other side of his desk, chin propped in his hand, ring glinting steady in the lamplight, and when she managed to stop crying, he said evenly, "If you want to go to the police, I'll help you."

"The police!" That was over the line. That was too much. She shook her head.

McCoy poured a half-inch of scotch into the glass. "Then I want you to promise me something."

"What?" Colleen asked.

"Promise me that you will type my direct line, and my home phone number, on that machine of yours."

Colleen frowned. "Why?"

McCoy lifted the glass, and gave her a steady look over the rim. "So I'll know that if you ever have reason to call me, you'll remember the number."