Laughing, Betty shook her head. “Hardly. If there were any fires ignited, they were from the arguments we had. Bernie and I couldn’t agree on anything, and I found him impossible to work with. Once he even went so far as to warn Sam that I was a meddling busybody and he’d do well not to see me again.”

Marjorie found all this a little difficult to believe. She’d met Bernie and seen for herself the way his gaze softened when he mentioned his wife’s name.

“I know it sounds unbelievable now, but we had serious problems.” Betty paused and ran the tips of her fingers over the chair’s armrest, caught up in her memories. “It seemed that no matter what I did or how careful I was, I couldn’t please the demanding Dr. Miller. Every time he and I were together, we ended up in a shouting match. There wasn’t a staff member on the entire floor who would come within twenty feet of us when we got going.”

“What happened to change all that?”

Betty shrugged, then a lazy smile began to grow until it practically lit up her round face. “Bernie came to my apartment one night after work. I’ll admit he looked terrible, but we’d had another one of our confrontations that day, and I wasn’t in any mood to be friendly.”

“What did he say?” Marjorie couldn’t help being curious.

“He wanted to talk.” Betty paused and grinned. “I told him to take a flying leap into the nearest cow pasture.”

Marjorie laughed outright. The idea of tiny Betty standing up to a stern-faced Bernie made for a comical picture. “I don’t imagine he was any too pleased with that suggestion.”

“No. I could sense he was struggling not to tell me where I should fly. But he didn’t. Instead he asked me how serious I was about Sam.”

Marjorie suspected that Bernie had been attracted to Betty from the first, but he was decent enough not to get involved with his best friend’s girlfriend.

“Sam was a friend,” Betty continued. “A good one. We’d dated off and on for years, but there was never anything serious between us. Fun stuff. You know—a baseball game, hikes now and again, that sort of thing. Neither one of us ever thought it was a romance for the ages.”

“But you let Bernie think otherwise.”

“Why not? He’d been a pill from the first. Besides, what was happening between Sam and me wasn’t any of his business. I told him that, too.”

“I suppose he left then.”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Lucky guess,” Marjorie said, holding in a knowing smile.