Divided in Death

Chapter 18

Peabody ate cobbler and watched as Eve and the computer added the hair from image one onto the head of image two.

“You know, you can do it all with one command if you-”

“I know I can do it all with one command,” Eve said irritably. “It doesn’t make the same damn point that way. Who’s running this game?”

“You know, getting shot at with a short-range missile makes you really testy.”

“Keep it up, and the next short-range missile’s going straight up your ass.”

“Dallas, you know how I love that sweet talk.” Shifting to a more comfortable position, Peabody licked her spoon, then waved it at the screen. “Okay, you add the bad hair, but it doesn’t change jaw structure or ear size and shape. Also, the witness makes Angelo slimmer, considerably slimmer than Carter Bissel. Fifteen pounds, easy. Bissel carried some extra weight according to his ID stats. The witness said Angelo was trim, in good physical shape. Again, you can add weight in a disguise, but you can’t shave off fifteen pounds overnight. If you could, I’d be signed up for the program.”

“If you don’t want to play, take your cobbler and scram. Computer, replicate facial scar from image one onto image two.”

“The entry into Powell’s apartment, as in the Bissel home, was slick.” Peabody scraped at the bowl, looking for any escaping cobbler as the computer complied with the command. “Has to be someone with experience or training. And all the murders in this case have been particularly cold, even the first ones, which were staged to look hot-blooded. It’s the very staging that makes them cold.”

“Nobody’s arguing that. Give me motive. Computer, assume front top teeth of image one is an implant. Calculate and replicate same on image two.”

“Covert organization screw-up-either one. Or, I’ve been thinking about this-a kind of gang war. The worm is complete so Doomsday must want to utilize. They know a shield’s being created. HSO and its associates create havoc to slow technos down or circumvent, or destroy the worm. Doomsday creates havoc to scatter resources, create havoc, which is what terrorists do anyway, and circumvent the creation of the shield until they get some use out of all the time, trouble, and expense they’ve gone to. One side murders a couple of operatives, the other snips off a potential loose thread-McCoy. One side grabs operative’s brother. The other steals dead operative’s body, and does the overkill attack on the primary investigator. Escalated espionage,” Peabody said with a shrug. “Not as iced as Bond, but plenty convoluted. It seems to me spies convolute everything.”

“Look at the images, Peabody.”

Peabody complied, and tapped the spoon gently on her teeth. “I see a resemblance, largely superficial, between the two images. Dallas, you put my image up there and do computer composites, you could make me look like Angelo. But don’t, okay, ‘cause I just ate.”

“Still hung up on the variation of jaw-line and the ears?”

“If you tried to take this into court, they’d throw you out.”

“Guess you’re right. Computer, remove image two and replace with image three.”

Peabody’s brows knit when the split screen showed two images of Angelo. “I don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?”

“Why are you projecting two images of the same guy?”

“Am I? You sure they’re the same guy? Maybe getting tossed around earlier’s messed up my vision.”

“You got Angelo up there side by side.” Concerned, Peabody shifted to study Eve’s face. “Look, if you don’t want to go to the hospital, maybe you could call Louise. She’d make a house call for you.”

“I don’t want to bother the busy Dr. Dimatto. Let’s just see what I… oh yeah, that’s right. Here’s what I meant to do. Computer, remove all replications from image three and display original.”

Eve sat back with a very satisfied grin as Peabody dropped the spoon. “That’s Bissel. That’s Blair Bissel.”

“It sure is, isn’t it? You know, I’m thinking reports of his death have been largely exaggerated.”

“I know you ran that theory, but I never thought you put real weight on it. The DNA, the prints, were Blair Bissel’s. His own wife ID’d him.”

“HSO training, several years on the job, even at a lower operative level, should give a guy the skills to doctor records, change his to his brother’s. Add overkill, the blood, the gore, the fact that Ewing was shocked, and the fact that in all probability Carter Bissel had undergone some recent surgery to enhance his fairly strong family resemblance to his brother. Body weight was high for Blair’s records, but not more than a lot of people lie about on official documents anyway. Nobody pays any attention to an extra ten or fifteen pounds.”

“I skim ten off mine. I don’t know why. It’s a compulsion.”

“We expect to see Blair Bissel, so we see him. Why should we question the identity of the victim?”

“But why would he go along with it? Carter? There wasn’t any sign of force, no ligatures. How do you induce somebody to undergo surgery, change appearance?”

“Could’ve paid him. Money, sex-probably both. Let’s screw with big brother and screw his girlfriend while we’re at it. No love lost between the brothers.”

“There’s a wide gulf between no love lost and deliberately, coldly murdering your brother and your lover. If Kade was helping to set Carter up-”

“Then Blair planned to do her all along. Yeah, that’s what I think. You want to fake your own death, do it in a big way. A vicious way that tosses the blood in your wife’s face, at least initially, and gets rid of the monkey on your back and one of the people who knew you intimately enough to muck the deal. They’ll say you were a cheat, a liar, a bastard. What do you care, you’re dead.”

“I have to think about this.” Peabody pushed away from the desk to pace. “With this theory, Blair and Kade did a number on Carter outside the HSO directive.”

“Maybe they started inside, probably did, but I figure they started coloring outside the lines at some point.”

“As a solution for the blackmail.”

“Partially. It’s money, it’s adventure, it’s risk. All those fit their profiles. But they had bigger goals. Keep going.”

“Crap. Blair was a liaison, doubling under HSO directive, as a liaison for Doomsday. Feeding them selected data for payment, and establishing himself as a source, a traitor, a free agent. Part of this cloak was his marriage to Reva Ewing, blueprinted by the HSO.”

“Corporate espionage on one hand-a lucrative game, and with so much privatization of intel- and data-gathering sources over the last couple of decades, the HSO has to compete with civilian companies for revenue.”

“Like Securecomp.”

“Like that, and the dozens of others on and off planet they arranged for Blair to plant his listening posts. And think about this, Peabody. You always have to have a backup plan. You require plausible deniability. What contingency plan do you suppose the architects of this blueprint drew up in the event one of the sculptures was detected?”

Peabody stopped in front of the screens, studied the faces. “Blair Bissel, fall guy.”

“You bet, and by association, Reva would fall with him and Securecomp is compromised. It could-and I think would-have been said that they’d worked together. After all, they were husband and wife.”

“So they were building a frame after all.”

“Contingencies. Blair’d been in the organization long enough for this to occur to him. And if not him, it occurred to Kade.”

“So he took steps to protect himself?” Peabody shook her head. “Really big steps.”

“Not only protection. Factor in the satisfaction of getting back at his blackmailing brother, Homeland-the people, the government who’d use and discard him if things went wrong. Then add a big shit-pile of money.”

“From the technos? He makes a deal with them. Unauthorized information. Something big.”

“He’s the bridge between points A and B, and he knows more about both points, in this aspect, than either point knows of each other. Because he’s the one passing the data. He’s in control of that. Heady stuff for a guy with his personality profile. Why not take more? More control, more power, more money, and get out? Only one way out. Go rogue, and they’ll hunt you down. Both sides.”

“But they won’t hunt if they think you’re dead.”

“There you go. Add to that the HSO busy trying to cover up the mess you left behind, the cops busy investigating a prime suspect handed them on a platter, and the death of the only person who had knowledge of your plans, and you’re in the cozy part of fat city.”

“What went wrong? Why isn’t he sitting in the surf on some island paradise, slurping rum punch and counting his money?”

“Maybe the payment wasn’t made. You don’t want to go putting all your eggs in a terrorist’s basket. They often end up scrambled. But he’d been trained well enough to have a contingency plan of his own. He gave McCoy something. He had to go back for it. She had to die for it.”

“And meanwhile, the primary isn’t buying his served-on-a-platter prime suspect. With the cops taking a closer look, so’s everyone else.”

“Yeah, things got screwed for him, almost from the start. Roarke’s into this Yeats guy who’s an old, dead Irish writer. He said something about things falling apart. The center doesn’t hold. The center hasn’t been holding for Blair Bissel.”

“And it’s been falling apart since you walked into the first crime scene.”

“He’s desperate, and he’s pissed, and he overthinks. He’s so worried about covering his ass, he keeps exposing it. He needs to stay dead, needs to collect his fee. Hard to do both. Killing Powell and destroying the body identified as his own was stupid. It prevents positive ID, but it also turns the trail around and heads it right back at him. He’s the only one who’d want that evidence destroyed.”

“Then he tries to take you out.”

“Like I said, he’s pissed. And he’s desperate. And you know what he is, under all this espionage, artsy, woman-sniffing bullshit, Peabody? He’s a screw-up. The kind that keeps making bigger, splashier mistakes to cover up the last one. He thinks he’s a stone-cold killer, but he’s a selfish, spoiled little boy playing-what’s that guy’s name-James Bond-then having a tantrum when he doesn’t quite pull it off.”

“He may not be stone-cold, but he’s killed four people, knocked you around pretty good, and put an assistant director of the HSO in the hospital.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t dangerous. Kids having temper tantrums are pretty damn dangerous. Scare the hell out of me.”

“So, according to your theory, we have a cranky, immature, HSO-trained killer.”

“Pretty much.”

Peabody blew out a breath that fluttered her ruler-straight bangs. “That is pretty scary. How do we catch him?”

“Working on that.” Eve started to prop her feet on the desk, had the twinge of revolting muscles shoot straight through her body. “Shit.”

“You’d better work on those bruises.”

“I don’t have bruises on my brain. I can still think. Let’s get the rest of the team in here, civilians included, and kick this ball around.”

“You want Ewing in on this?”

“She was married to him for two years. It might have been a convenience to him, but she still would’ve learned something about him. Habits, fantasies, hangouts. If Sparrow lives, regains consciousness, and opts to share information on Bissel, that may help, but right now, Reva Ewing’s our best source.”

“You’re going to tell her that the husband she was accused of murdering is not only alive, in your opinion, but is the one who set her up?”

“If she can’t deal with it, she’s no help and we’re no worse off. Let’s see if she inherited any of her mother’s spine.”

Feeney came in muttering figures and command codes into a PPC. His chin was stubbled with ginger and gray and the bags under his eyes could’ve held a week’s marketing for a family of three-but there was a gleam in them.

“Bad time to interrupt, kid,” he said to Eve. “We’re on the verge.”

“There’s another prong to this investigation, and that may be on the verge, too. Where are the others?”

“Roarke and Tokimoto are finishing up running a series. Don’t want to walk away in the middle of that, not after what it’s taken to get there. We got one of Kade’s units as clean as it’s going to get. McNab and Ewing are just about done reinstalling some…”

He stopped, pursed his lips as he finally lifted his head and took a good look at her. “Said you got slammed around. They meant it. Ought to put some ice on that eye.”

“Is it going black? Damn it.” She pressed her fingers gingerly along the top edge of her cheekbone, and felt the bolt of pain right down to her toes. “I took a blocker. Isn’t that enough?”

Peabody came out of the kitchen with an ice bandage. “If you let me put this on it, it’ll sting a minute, and look stupid. But it’ll decrease the bruising and swelling. You may not end up with a full shiner.”

“Just do it, don’t talk about it.”

Eve set her teeth while Peabody fixed the bandage. The sting drowned out the throbbing, which wasn’t that much of an improvement.

“Ouch,” McNab commented with a sympathetic wince as he strolled in. “Heard you lost your ride, too.”

“Wasn’t much of a loss. Where’s Ewing?”

“Right behind me. Just had to make a pit stop. Okay if I pump some fuel? I’m empty.”

“There’s cobbler,” Peabody called out as he was already heading to the kitchen. “Apple-cranberry.”

“Cobbler?” Feeney repeated.

“Jeez. Go ahead.” Eve threw up her hands. “Eat, drink, be merry. Every multiple homicide investigation should have cobbler.”

“I’m going to get you something cold to drink,” Peabody decided. “You should probably be pushing fluids.”

With that Eve found herself alone in her office, wondering how she’d so easily lost the reins of her team.

Marital discord, she decided, was like some sort of low-grade fever that threw the whole system just slightly out of whack so you couldn’t manage to function at full capacity.

She wasn’t at the top of her game, that was for sure, and had no idea how to get back there again.

“You want food,” she snapped out the minute Reva came in, “get food. You want drink, get drink. But make it fast. This isn’t a damn twenty-four/seven.”

Reva merely angled her head. “I’m fine, thanks. But I’m betting you feel as bad as you look. Roarke and Tokimoto are going to be a few more minutes. They’re at a flash point.”

“They aren’t the only ones. We’re not going to wait for them. Or for anybody else!” she called out. “You’re going to want to sit down for this.”

“Because this is going to be a really long lecture or because you’re going to, metaphorically, give me a punch?”

“I’m hoping you can take a punch.”

Reva nodded and took the closest chair. “Don’t pull it. Whatever it is, I’d rather you go for the knockout instead of a lot of testing jabs. I’m tired. And with every hour that passes, I feel more of an idiot for not seeing what was in front of my face, day after day, for over two years.”

“What was in front of your face was a guy who behaved and portrayed himself as someone who loved you, and was brought into your life by someone else you trusted.”

“Goes a long way to measuring how well I judge people.”

“They were pros at what they did, and they worked hard to set you up, right along. Were you supposed to look at this guy and think: Hey, secret agent?”

“No.” Reva’s lips curved. “But you’d think I’d get some vibes about liar and cheat.”

“They screened you and they studied you. They knew everything there was to know about you before you met either of them. They knew what was public and private. You were laid up for months for shielding a president, for doing your job. Maybe they hoped you’d have some resentment about that, or that your work for the government would make you open to working with them.”

“Fat fucking chance.”

“And when they got that, they moved on you personally. He knew what you liked to eat, what flowers you preferred, your hobbies, your finances, who you slept with or cared about. You were nothing to them but a tool, and they knew how to use you.”

“The first night, at the art showing, he asked me if I’d have a drink with him. Great-looking guy, funny, sweet, hey, why not. We sat for hours, talking. I felt like I’d known him all my life. Like I’d been waiting for him all my life.”

She looked down at her hands. “I’d been involved before, pretty serious involvement before I was injured, then that fell apart. But nothing came close to what I felt for Blair. And it was all fabrication. It wasn’t perfect. He’d get sulky or irritated at the least slight or criticism, but I figured that was part of the deal, you know? Part of being married and figuring each other out, making each other happy. I wanted to make him happy. I wanted to make it work.”

“It’s never perfect,” Eve said half to herself. “Whenever you think it is, something sneaks up and bites you on the ass.”

“I’ll say. Anyway, I’m tired. Tired of feeling stupid, of feeling sorry for myself. So tell me why I’m sitting down. One punch.”

“Okay. It’s my belief that Blair Bissel orchestrated and committed the homicides at Felicity Kade’s apartment, killing her and his brother in order to fake his own death and implicate you.”

“That’s just crazy.” The words wheezed out as if the punch had landed hard on her throat. “He’s dead. Blair’s dead. I saw him.”

“You saw what you were meant to see, just as you saw what you were meant to see when he approached you two and a half years ago. And this time, you were in shock and almost immediately incapacitated.”

“But… it was verified.”

“I think he switched his identification records with his brother’s, in preparation. I believe he set an elaborate stage so that you, the police, and the clandestine organizations he’d been playing against each other would believe him dead. Nobody looks for the dead, Reva.”

“It’s insane. I’m telling you it’s insane, Dallas.” Reva got to her feet as the others came in from the kitchen. “Blair was a liar and a cheat. He used me. I’m doing everything I can to accept all that. I’ll live with that. But he wasn’t a killer, he wasn’t someone who could… could hack two people to death.”

“Who stood to gain from his death?”

“I-you mean financially?”

“In any way.”

“I did, I guess. There’s money, decent money. You know all that.”

“Decent money,” Eve repeated. “You’ve got decent money of your own. He’ll have hidden accounts, and once we find them-”

“Located, listed, and filed on your computer,” Roarke said as he walked in. “As requested, Lieutenant.”

“How much?”

“In excess of four million spread over five accounts.”

“Not enough.”

Roarke inclined his head. “Perhaps not, but it’s all there is. He was neither particularly frugal nor skilled in investment areas. All the accounts have slow, steady leaks over the six years they’ve been opened. He spends, and he speculates, and most usually loses his capital.”

“That plays.” She began to re-evaluate. “Okay, that plays. He goes through money, he needs more money. A big score.”

“So he kills Felicity and his brother to get it, implicates me? You’re painting a monster. I wasn’t married to a monster.”

“You were married to an illusion.”

Reva’s head jerked back as if the blow had landed. “You’re grabbing at air because you don’t have anything else. And because you don’t want to leave me with nothing. I loved him, whether or not he was an illusion. Do you understand the concept?”

“I’m familiar with it.”

“You want me to believe I loved someone capable of murder. Cold-blooded, cold-minded murder.”

It took all her will to keep her gaze from flicking, even for an instant, toward Roarke. And to keep her heart and mind from asking herself that same question.

“What you believe is your own business. How you handle this is up to you. If you can’t deal with the direction of my investigation, you’re no use to me.”

“You’re the cold-blooded one. The cold-minded one. And I’ve been used just about enough.”

When she strode out, Tokimoto eased away from the door and followed her.

“Gee, she took that well.” Now Eve allowed herself a slow scan of faces. “Would anyone like to complete this briefing, or should we break for comments about my need for sensitivity training?”

“It’s a hard knock, Dallas,” Feeney said. “No way for you to pretty it up for her. She’ll be back when she shakes it off.”

“We’ll work without her. Bissel has accounts in various locations, odds are he’s got a bolt-hole-a lavish one, maybe more than one. He’s still in the city, cleaning up after himself, so he must have one here. We find it.”

“I found two properties,” Roarke put in. “One in the Canary Islands, the other in Singapore. Neither were very well cloaked, meaning if I found them so easily, others would.”

“So they’re probably blinds. He’s not completely stupid. Let’s look in his brother’s name, or Kade’s, Ewing’s. He might have set himself up, using them as cover, then if… No, no. Shit! McCoy. Chloe McCoy. He had to have more use for her than the occasional bang. Check it out. See if he tucked away funds and/or property in her name somehow. He killed her for a reason, and my take is this guy kills for money and self-preservation.”

“I’ll take that,” McNab volunteered. “Working on a cobbler rush.”

“Get started. I’m going to check on Sparrow, see if he’s coherent and I can dig anything out of him. Feeney, I’m leaving you and Roarke on the machines. If Reva’s backed out and Tokimoto’s busy patting her head, you’re going to be shorthanded.”

“Another tanker of coffee ought to keep us in the game.”

“You may want an update before you rush off, Lieutenant. We’re retrieving data from Kade’s unit. It’s encrypted, but we’ll get through that.”

“Great, good. Let me know when-”

“I’m not finished. Each of Kade’s units was corrupted, but not through a networking worm. They were burned individually.”

“So what? Look, this is EDD territory. All I need is the bottom line. I need the data.”

“You don’t give electronics enough respect,” Feeney stated.

“And neither, I’d venture, does Bissel.” As Eve hadn’t touched the glass of chilled juice Peabody had brought her, Roarke picked it up and helped himself. “The potential worm’s import is its theoretic ability to corrupt an entire networking system, however small or large, however simple or complex, with one stroke, to corrupt and shut down, irretrievably. That’s not what we’re dealing with. It’s a shade of that, an early version perhaps, but not nearly as powerful as we’ve been led to believe. It’s been relatively easy to clean and retrieve from the units we’ve got.”

“Relatively.” Feeney rolled his aching eyes. “It’s nasty business, but it’s not global security shit. What it is, is smoke.”

“Which means he doesn’t have what he thought he had-what he was going to parlay into a nice retirement fund. But maybe someone else does, or maybe… Son of a bitch. He wasn’t trying to take me out.” She tapped her fingers absently over her bruised eye. “He hit his target. Aim was a little off, but he hit.”

Roarke inclined his head as his thoughts marched with hers. “Sparrow.”

“It’d help to have somebody on the inside, somebody with some juice who could adjust or create data in-house. And provide protection. Sparrow. He’s the organized thinker. The planner. Look at Bissel. He’s not brave, he’s not very smart, he hasn’t been able to work himself up in the organization. Just a delivery boy. And here’s a big opportunity, handed to him from one of the brass. The big score. Little scores all along. The corporate espionage. Could be, just could be, some of that was outside Homeland, a little personal partnership. Bissel though, he can’t capitalize. Just a screw-up with money. I bet his partner’s done better. A hell of a lot better.”

“Why not just kill Bissel then?” Peabody asked.

“Because you need a contingency. You need a fall guy. He set the putz up. Still the delivery boy. Bissel goes to deliver the worm disc to the high bidder, and it’s not the deal. He gets the shaft. Now he’s a dead man, a desperate one. He’s running, he’s hiding, and at all costs he has to stay dead. Our friend from the HSO wants him to stay dead, too, and he’s ready with the company line about global security when the investigation doesn’t turn the way he anticipated.”

“I imagine he planned to make an honest man out of Bissel by turning him into a dead man,” Roarke said. “Quietly, at some point.”

“Should’ve moved on that sooner rather than later, and he wouldn’t be in the hospital. I think he forgot to factor one vital element into the equation. When somebody like Bissel starts killing, it gets easier every time.”

She pulled out her communicator. “I want a block on Sparrow. I don’t want anybody, not even the medicals, talking to him until I get my shot. Start reeling in that data.”

“Hook up that tanker of coffee,” Feeney reminded her, then headed out.

“I need a moment, Lieutenant.” Roarke glanced at Peabody. “A private one.”

“I’ll wait outside.” Peabody slipped out, shut the door.

“I don’t have time to go into personal business,” Eve began.

“Sparrow has access to your data, to what happened in Dallas. If you’re right about all of this, he might very well use it against you. Make it public, even altering it in some way that twists the truth.”

“I can’t worry about that.”

“I can make it disappear. If you want that… element removed, I can remove it. You’re entitled to your privacy, Eve. You’re entitled to be secure that your own victimization won’t be used to draw speculation, gossip-and the pity you’d hate more than either.”

“You want me to give you the nod to tamper with government files?”

“No, I want you to tell me if you’d prefer those files didn’t exist. Hypothetically.”

“Which would let me off the hook. Legally. I wouldn’t be an accessory if I just made a little wish, and poof. This is a hell of a day. This is a hell of a funny day.”

Because emotion was flooding her throat again, she turned away. “You and me, we haven’t been this far apart from each other since the beginning. I can’t reach you, and I can’t let you reach me.”

“You don’t see me, Eve. When you look at me, you don’t see the whole of me. Maybe I’ve preferred that.”

She thought of Reva, of illusions, and a mockery of a marriage. Nothing could be further from what they were dealing with. Roarke had never lied, nor pretended to be something other than what he was. And she had seen him, right from the first moment.

“You’re wrong, and you’re stupid.” There was more weariness than temper in the words, and as such struck him more forcefully. “I don’t know how to get through this. I can’t talk to you about it, because it just circles. I can’t talk to anyone else, because if I tell them what’s ripping at us, it makes them an accessory. You think I don’t see you?”

She turned back, looked straight into his eyes. “I’m looking at you, and I see you. I know you’re capable of killing, and feeling justified, feeling right. I know that, and I’m still here. I don’t know what the hell to do, but I’m still here.”

“If I wasn’t capable, I wouldn’t be who I am, what I am, where I am. Neither of us would be here, wrestling with this.”

“Maybe not, but I’m too tired to wrestle. I have to go. I need to go.” She walked quickly to the door, wrenched it open. Then she shut her eyes. “Make it disappear. Fuck hypothetical. I take responsibility for what I say, what I do. Make it gone.”

“Consider it done.”

When she left him, he sat down at her desk in the quiet, and wished, with everything inside him, that he could make the rest of it vanish as easily.

Reva waylaid her on the way outside. “I don’t have time,” Eve said curtly and kept moving.

“It’ll only take a minute. I want to apologize. I asked you to give it to me straight, and when you did, I didn’t handle it. I’m sorry, and I’m pissed off at myself for reacting the way I did.”

“Forget it. Are you going to handle it now?”

“Yeah, I’m going to handle it now. What do you need?”

“I need you to think. Where he might go, what his next steps would be in a crisis. What’s he doing now besides trying to find a way out? Think it through, lay it out. Have it ready for me when I get back.”

“You’ll have it. He’d have to work,” she called out as Eve streamed out the door. “His art wasn’t just a cover, it couldn’t have been. It’s his passion, his escape, his ego. He’d have to have a place to work.”

“Good. Keep it up. I’ll be back.”

“That was well-done.” Tokimoto stepped out of the parlor, into the foyer.

“I hope so. I’m not doing so well otherwise.”

“You need time to adjust, to grieve, to be angry. I hope you’ll feel able to talk to me when you need someone.”

“I’ve been talking you black-and-blue so far.” She sighed. “Tokimoto, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Are you hitting on me?”

He stiffened like a rod. “That would be inappropriate under the circumstances.”

“Because I might still be married or because you’re not interested?”

“Your marriage would hardly be a factor, considering. But you’re not in a state of mind where… An advance of a personal nature is clearly inappropriate while your emotions and your situation are in flux.”

She found herself smiling, just a little. And found something opening inside her again, just a little. “You didn’t say you weren’t interested, so I’ll just say I don’t think I’d mind. If you worked up to hitting on me.”

To test it out, she rose on her toes and touched her lips lightly to his. “No,” she said after a moment, “I don’t think I’d mind. Why don’t you think about it?”

She was still smiling, just a little, as she started back upstairs.