Free The Touch by Randall Wallace

psychologist, she’s excellent. Maybe if you and she sat down together and talked about the issues that—”
    Jones pushed back from the table, with icy calm.
    Lara spoke hurriedly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
    â€œNo, it’s fine.”
    â€œNo, please, it’s not fine.”
    â€œI’m sorry I’ve wasted your time, and I don’t want to waste your dinner. It’s been . . .” Without another word he stood and walked out.
    * * *
    Jones was striding quickly along the sidewalk when Lara broke from the restaurant doors and rushed to catch him. “Dr. Jones! Please—I’m sorry! Your life is your life, and I don’t mean to violate your privacy. I know I’ve done that already, it’s just . . . this project means a lot to me, personally, and . . . I just don’t know when to quit.”
    Without breaking stride, he said, “And you think maybe I’m a quitter?”
    â€œI didn’t say that!”
    â€œNo, I said that.” Jones stopped and wheeled toward her, but instead of staring into her he stared away, some argument raging within his own head. She watched him, and she did not push him now; she had pushed too much already.
    And in that moment an awareness dawned in Lara that both thrilled and disturbed her; she realized that Jones found her as unique as she found him. She knew he wanted to walk away from her and her offer the way he had walked away from everyone else who sought to exploit his talents; yet she was sure, in the way women are always sure of what can’t be proven yet is clear to them alone, that the few moments they had spent together were as welcome to Jones in his aloneness as they were to Lara in hers.
    For what seemed to her a long time he stared at the distant blue mountains. Then he said, “The micro sculptures. Would you like to see how they’re made?”
    Her smile grew slowly, from small to huge. “Oh yeah,” she said.
    * * *
    What she saw through the magnifying lenses—one for each eye, resembling a pair of blunted binoculars—reminded her of one of those cigar store Indians she had seen pictured in history books, so massive and majestic did it look. It was an exquisite carving: a handsome head held nobly, the proud posture of a chieftain in ceremonial feathered headdress, exquisite detail evident in the chiseled features of the face of red clay, a sculpture not quite complete. Jones lifted an instrument and eased Lara to the side so that he could share one of the viewing lenses with her, and as she watched through the other she saw an amazing apparition: a sculpting blade moved into her view, and it looked impossibly huge in comparison. The flaws in the steel of the scalpel showed like canyons on the moon.
    Jones removed the blade from her view and stepped back so that Lara could look through both lenses again. “This is a practice model,” he said. “I try to get the residents in here to experiment with the technique, and I start them on oversized pieces.”
    â€œOversized?” Lara wondered, looking through the magnifiers at the noble chieftain. “How large is this?”
    â€œThe chief here is about the size of an exclamation point, in standard type.” He flipped on the light of a microscope on the lab table. “This one is a bit smaller. It would fit inside a period.”
    She pulled back from the magnifiers, shot a disbelieving glance at him, and leaned to look through the microscope. What she saw there was a statue of Thomas Jefferson, standing within the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial. The carving looked so real that she spoke in a whisper, as if not to disturb him. “Jefferson . . .”
    â€œCan you read the inscription?”
    She pulled back from the microscope. “You’re kidding.”
    He just looked at her. She peered back into the lenses and dialed the scope around to