“No, it’s fine. I’m just not hungry.” It was the truth. She was too keyed up to eat. In fact, she wasn’t sure she had tasted a single bite of what was on her plate. “I’m sorry. You went to all this trouble, and I’m being rude.”

“Forget it. It gave me a chance to eat off real plates instead of wolfing down my food over the sink. That’s what guys do, by the way, when they live all alone in the woods. They turn into cavemen.”

“Do you actually like living up here all by yourself?”

He leaned back in his chair, propping a leg on the corner of the table. “Never really thought about it. It is what it is, I guess.”

Christy-Lynn squinted one eye against the sun as she continued to study him. His answer had been just a little too nonchalant to be convincing. “I don’t think I knew you were married the first time we met, but I seem to remember there being a woman with you—sleek, brunette, very glam.”

“Simone.”

“What happened there?”

“I think the question you’re looking for is, Who happened?”

“There was someone else?”

“Someone elses,” he corrected drily. “Plural. She was ambitious. I’ll give her that. But not very good at covering her tracks. To be honest, I think she stopped bothering. When I finally confronted her, she told me she was glad I knew, that I’d become a self-righteous bore, and she didn’t know why she ever married me.”

Christy-Lynn winced, a mingled pang of pity and guilt. It had never occurred to her that he might have suffered a few heartaches of his own. Or that when he spoke about infidelity he was speaking from experience. “I suppose it would be hard to save any marriage after that.”

He eyed her grimly. “The phrase ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men’ comes to mind.” He reached past his water and grabbed his beer instead, draining it in one long swallow. “It was inevitable, I suppose. We weren’t a couple. We were a team. Work was what we had. Maybe all we had. When I left Week in Review that was gone. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve come to terms with it.”

She studied him a moment, the tight lines around his mouth, the rapid tick that had begun to pulse at his temple. “Have you?”

He looked away, but not before a shadow darkened his face. “I thought we were supposed to be talking about Stephen.”

Wade’s words felt like a glass of icy water poured down her back. She pulled in a lung full of air, then pushed it back out very slowly, hands braced on the arms of her chair. “Yes, we are. So let’s have it.”

“Her name was Honey Rawlings.”

Christy-Lynn sat very still, letting the name play over in her head, and for one terrible moment, she was back in the morgue, staring down at the chalk-white face from her nightmares, beautiful and bloodless. Honey.

“Did your . . . source happen to mention how they met?”

“I’m afraid not. But we do know she was from West Virginia—a little spit of a town called Riddlesville.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket and laid it open on the table. “It appears she still has family there. A grandmother named Loretta, and a brother, the honorable Reverend Ray Rawlings. We did manage to find an address for the grandmother, but if either of them has a phone, it isn’t listed. Not sure if that’s new since the accident or not. It could be, though. Apparently the family’s a bit sensitive about Honey’s involvement with a married man. The brother has threatened to sue the entire state of Maine if his sister’s name ever leaks in connection with your husband’s, which is why I’m guessing the police have been so tight-lipped.”

Christy-Lynn stared at the scribbled notes—Honey Rawlings of Riddlesville, West Virginia. She had expected to feel . . . something. Relief. Closure. Anything. But Wade was right. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. Still, he had done what he promised.

“I don’t know how to thank you. I was—”

“There’s more.”

Christy-Lynn leaned back in her chair, waiting.

“Your contact at the station, the detective friend of Stephen’s—”

“Connelly.”

“Yes, Connelly. He was the leak. Apparently, he talked one of the maintenance guys from the morgue into snapping some shots of Honey with his phone. Word on the street is they each netted five figures. Hence, the detective’s so-called early retirement.”

Christy-Lynn shook her head, still trying to digest the news. He claimed to be Stephen’s friend, and the whole time he was lecturing her about policies and procedures he’d been scheming to make a buck off the death of her husband.

“So that’s it? He’s just allowed to retire?”

“My guess is he was told to clean out his desk and allowed to slink off to Florida like the reptile he is. And just like that, it all goes away.”

Christy-Lynn shook her head, disgusted. Another body blow, and one more thing that wasn’t what it seemed. Suddenly she was exhausted, too tired or disillusioned to vent the frustration roiling in her chest. “Is that all?”

Wade seemed surprised by the question. “Isn’t that enough?”

“I was hoping your guy might have learned when it started or how they met.”

“Sorry. If you want those kinds of details, you’re going to have to talk to her family. He did do all the standard legwork though, ran the usual searches through Factiva and Lexis, even talked to one of his guys.”