The Conspiracy Club by Jonathan Kellerman

garlic-olive. “What about you? Where are you from?”
    Jeremy weighed his options. There was the short answer: the last city he’d lived in, the school from which he’d graduated, the artful digression to work-talk.
    The long answer was: an only child, he’d been five years old when Mom and Dad were killed in a twenty-car, New Year’s Eve auto pileup on a sleet-slicked turnpike. At the moment of fatal impact, he’d been sleeping at his maternal grandmother’s house, dreaming of the board game Candy Land. He knew that because someone had told him, and he’d preserved it like a specimen. But the rest of the preorphan years were a greasy blur. Nana had failed soon after and been sent to a home, and he was raised by his father’s mother, a bitterly altruistic woman who never recovered from the crushing responsibility. After her fade to senility, the boy, then eight, was taken in by a series of distant relatives, followed by a sequence of foster homes, none abusive or attentive. Then, the Basalt Preparatory Academy agreed to accept him as a charity case because members of its new board decided something
Socially Conscious Finally Needed to Be Done.
    His formative years — the period psychoanalysts so absurdly term “latency” — were filled with bunk beds, drills, a full menu of humiliation, uncertainty for dessert. Jeremy turned inward, bested the rich kids at the academic game despite the tutors that flocked to them like remora. He graduated third in his class, turned down the chance to go to West Point, entered college, took five years to earn his baccalaureate because of having to work minimum-wage night jobs. Another year tending bar and delivering groceries and tutoring dull, rich children helped him save up some money, after which he attended graduate school on full fellowship.
    Earning his Ph.D. hadn’t been tough. He’d written his dissertation in three weeks. Back then, writing had come easily.
    Then: starving intern, postdoc fellow, the position at City Central. Seven years on the wards. Jocelyn.
    What he said was: “I grew up in the Midwest — ah, here comes the food.”
     
     
    During dinner, one of them, Jeremy wasn’t sure who, steered the conversation to hospital politics, and he and Angela talked shop. When they returned to the car, she took his arm. Back at her door, she looked into his eyes, rose on tiptoes, kissed his cheek hard, and retracted her head. “I had a great time.”
    Drawing the boundary: this far, no farther.
    Fine with him, he had no stomach for passion.
    “I did, too,” he said. “Have a good night.”
    Angela flashed perfect, white teeth. Clacked her purse open, found her key, and gave a tiny wave and was on the other side of the door before either of them was pressed to say more.
    Jeremy stood in the grubby hallway and waited until her footsteps faded before turning heel.
     
10
     
    O ver the next three weeks, Angela and Jeremy went out four times. Scheduling was a challenge: twice, Angela had to cancel because of patient emergencies and a surprise request by the chief of medicine for Jeremy to deliver a grand rounds on procedural anxiety caused him to offer apologies — he needed the evening to prepare.
    “No problem,” she said, and when Jeremy delivered his talk, she was sitting in the fifth row of the hospital auditorium. Afterward, she winked at him and squeezed his hand and hurried off to join the other residents on morning rounds.
    The next night, they had their fifth date.
     
     
    Basic, unimaginative stuff, their time together. No couples-bungee-jumping, no edgy concerts or performance art exhibits, no long rides out of the city, past the harbor and the western suburbs to the flat plains, where the moon was huge and you could find a quiet place to park and consider infinity. Jeremy knew the plains well. He’d spent most of his life in the Midwest, but sometimes it still shocked him.
    Long ago — before Jocelyn, when he’d been simply lonely — he’d