“Why?” Jolie challenged gently. “Because I’m taking a cut in salary? Sorry to be trite, but money isn’t everything.”

“Great,” Greer sighed, looking from Jolie to me and back again, as though she were searching for some secret we were keeping from her, one that would make her life all right again. “You sound like Mojo. Take it as it comes. Skim the surface and never get in too deep.”

Jolie straightened slightly in her chair, and I tensed. It would be easy to call Greer on the glaring disparity between her talk and her walk, but it wouldn’t be kind, and Greer needed kindness at the moment. We could deal with the bullshit later, when she was strong again, and capable of fighting back.

“Do you ever regret closing the design business?” Jolie asked quietly.

I let out my figurative breath.

Tears stood in Greer’s eyes. “Yes,” she said, after a long, uncomfortable pause. “Does that make you happy?”

“Pull your head out of your butt, Greer,” Jolie said, in her singular Jolie way. “Mojo and I are on your side. I know all about the cheating husband, and how you hired Mojo to prove or disprove the theory. But something else is going on here—something you’re not telling. If you fess up, we might be able to help you.”

Greer became fascinated with the waterfall in the pool.

Under the table, Russell shifted, in some doggy dream, and thumped his tail against the patio stones.

Jolie and I waited. I was nervous, but Jolie looked like a woman with her teeth in something and meaning to chew.

“I’m being blackmailed,” Greer said, after three or four changes in the partisan balance of Congress.

“Blackmailed?” I echoed, no longer slumping in my chair. “By whom?”

“Well, if I knew that,” Greer told me tersely, “I could put a stop to it, couldn’t I?”

“Details,” Jolie demanded. “How did they contact you? Letters? E-mail? Have you told the police?”

“Of course I haven’t told the police,” Greer answered in a peevish tone. She was huddling inside herself again, holding herself together with both arms. “I don’t want this to become public knowledge. That, after all, is the whole point of giving in to blackmail, isn’t it?”

“Why didn’t you say something before?” I asked, more hurt than angry. In the years since Lillian and I had rescued Greer from the bus station, I’d never discovered anything real about her background. It was as if her life started that day in Boise, and the trail she’d followed to get there had dissolved, or never existed in the first place. I’d had to go on guesswork and suppositions.

Greer said nothing. She just looked at me.

“Shit,” I said, as revelation struck. “You were testing me. If I could nail Alex for adultery, then you would consider siccing me on the blackmailer.”

“Maybe,” she said.