Timothy Rittman Adams

Mark had talked to desperate people on the suicide hotline, but never to anyone like the mysterious Greta. In late 1974 she called almost every night he was on shift to talk about her violent, paranoid Vietnam vet husband. She wouldn’t speak to another volunteer.

Mark couldn’t stay detached. Greta didn’t know that he was a pothead clerk at a liquor store, had told Mark that she imagined him as a therapist, a professor, even a priest. No one had ever depended on him like this. And her abusive husband already had struck her, choked her, drawn blood. Mark was afraid he would kill her.