“Actually, it’s my way of avoiding work. My writing day pretty much sucked, so I thought I’d try my hand at cooking instead.”
Christy-Lynn wandered to the small bistro table in the corner as he wrestled with a box of vermicelli. His Mac was there and open, a Word document up on the screen. She had just begun to read the opening lines of chapter eighteen when Wade snaked an arm past her and lowered the screen.
“Please don’t read that.”
“Sorry. Force of habit. The editor in me, I guess. I should have known you’d be the protective type. A lot of men are.”
“More like the embarrassed type,” he corrected with a scowl. “Not one of my better efforts, I’m afraid. In fact, I meant to delete the whole scene.”
“It isn’t as easy as it looks, is it?”
“What?”
“Writing the great American novel.”
“I take it that’s a shot about my lack of reverence for your husband’s work?”
“No. Just an observation. You did call him a hack though, which is a pretty harsh thing to say to a man who’s cranked out a dozen bestsellers.”
“Cranked being the operative word.”
Christy-Lynn bit back her initial response, confused by a knee-jerk need to defend Stephen despite the validity of Wade’s criticism. Habit, she supposed. Or misplaced loyalty. Like the night she had unloaded on him in the bar at the Omni.
“It doesn’t really matter now, does it? Can’t we just drop it?”
Wade gave the pasta a quick stir then set down his spoon. “I just think if you’re going to put a hundred thousand words on paper, you should take the time to choose the right ones, instead of just grabbing the ones on the bottom shelf. Writing should be about quality not quantity.”
“I agree with that. In fact, I tell my writers the same thing. But there’s a lot less time to reach for those top-shelf words when you’re writing to contract. Deadlines are real, and if you want to keep getting paid to write books, you treat them as sacred. It’s a matter of finding the line between efficiency and integrity and then walking it. It’s tricky.”
“Did Stephen walk that line?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think your husband cared about integrity?”
Christy-Lynn stared at him, wondering if she’d lost the thread of the conversation. “Are we talking about writing or something else?”
“I’m talking about both—about everything. Integrity isn’t something you have in some parts of your life and not in others. You either have it, or you don’t. I’m asking if you think Stephen did.”
Christy-Lynn was both startled and confused by the intensity in his tone. “Under the circumstances, I’m not sure I’m the right person to ask.”
“You were married to him. That makes you the perfect person to ask.”
“I can tell you he was dedicated to his career, that he worked all the time and never missed a deadline. He started every morning at five and worked past midnight a lot of nights. Sometimes he’d even go off and check into a hotel somewhere so he could—” She stopped midsentence, letting the words trail away. “Except he wasn’t working, was he? He was with her.”
Wade dropped his gaze to the floor. “I didn’t mean to dredge up—”
“Your pasta’s about to boil over,” she said flatly, cutting him off and effectively ending the conversation. The sooner they got through dinner, the sooner she would have her answers.
They ate out on the deck or at least attempted to. Thirty minutes in, Christy-Lynn gave up the pretense and pushed back her plate. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“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.