“I can try and explain it if you like, but the truth is, I don’t know if I can. I was coming off a shitty relationship with someone my age who turned out to be a worthless human being. Your father and I . . . it was almost instant, like when you feel you’ve known someone your whole life five minutes after meeting them. And he was kind, as you know. But he was married, and even if he wasn’t, he was nearly twenty-five years older than me, so it’s not like I thought there was potential. But I let myself fall in love, even became a little obsessed. I think he knew—no, I know he knew—and I think he decided to not take advantage of it. But whenever he came to the city he’d take me out to dinner. We had a place, a Spanish restaurant, that we always went to. We’d started going there when we first met because it was the first restaurant we’d hit when we walked out of the blacked-out portion of the city to where there was still electricity. And we kept going there. We even had our own special table, not that we always got it, but we usually did, and the owner and his wife treated us like we were a couple.”

“But you weren’t yet?” Harry said.

“Well, not yet, but then we were. It wasn’t casual, Harry. It was serious. That’s why I know he wasn’t having another affair. I think your stepmother made that up, that maybe she’s trying to deflect the police from looking at her.”

“You think she had something to do with my father’s death.”

“I don’t really know why I’m here, but yes, I’ve thought about it, thought about Alice having something to do with your father’s death. That’s why I came up, I guess, and why I wanted to meet you. To find out if you knew anything.”

“Did you think Alice found out about you and my father?”

Grace shifted forward. “The last time I saw your father, about two and a half weeks ago, he talked about Alice a lot. It was something he never really did, so I thought it was strange. He told me that she’d started acting strange toward him. She couldn’t make eye contact, she was totally cold. He kept asking her what was going on, but she wouldn’t say anything.”

“It sounds like she found out about you two.”

“That’s what we thought, but we went over it, and there just didn’t seem to be any way she could have.”

“There could be a thousand ways. She could have found one of your hairs on his coat, she could have hired a detective, she could have just felt it, known it.”