“And you didn’t think it was a good idea?”

Meredith sighed. “This is really difficult for me. No, I didn’t think it was a good idea. I knew it would hurt her sales, but that would’ve been her price for her choice. That wasn’t what it was about for me. I told Penny she was forgetting something important. She was forgetting there were two people in this relationship.”

“But her coming out wouldn’t automatically implicate you, would it? You didn’t technically live together. You have separate postal addresses, separate front doors. Your lives are legally detached,” Lindsay protested.

Meredith shook her head. “You don’t understand the kind of job I do. Every damn year, I get vetted. That’s why you never see me the second half of March and the first half of April. That’s when it’s my turn, so I have to look like Little Miss Prim around then. I need top security clearance to do my job. Soon as it became public knowledge that the person who lives in the other half of the house is a lesbian, they’d start to look a lot more carefully at me. If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll find it. Besides, you know what it was like for Pen. She wasn’t some literary writer that nobody’s ever heard of. She was a celeb. There isn’t a literate teenager in America who hasn’t read a Penny Varnavides Darkliners novel. She comes out and there’s going to be media interest. And they’re going to want to know exactly who her lover is. I had no chance of surviving if she came out.”

Lindsay closed her eyes momentarily. “I’d avoid saying that to the police, if I was you,” she sighed. “So, Penny was talking about coming out and you were trying to dissuade her. That about the size of it?”

“I guess.”

“So how did you get from there to splitting up?”

Meredith looked away. “The whole thing was so dumb.” Her voice was bitter.

“It usually is,” Lindsay said.

“We were fighting a lot. That’s something we’d never done before. Things never used to escalate like that between us. But it seemed like every time we were together we ended up fighting about whether she should come out.” Meredith ran her hands through her hair in a gesture of frustration. “It was driving me crazy. I need to be clear-headed at work, I need to be able to think straight. And Penny was making me nuts. She just wouldn’t be logical about the situation.”

Lindsay waited. Eventually she said, “It’s a lot of pressure, when things start going wrong between you and your lover. Something’s got to give.”

Meredith nodded. “It did. I slept with somebody else. I was out of town, we had dinner together. She was all the things Penny used to be with me—warm, funny, sympathetic. And I slept with her. I didn’t even need a few drinks to get me there, I went sober and willing.”

Lindsay thought back to a time when infidelity had been something infinitely casual to her. It was so alien to her relationship with Sophie, it felt like a past life experience. But memory helped her construct a glimmer of what that urge to betrayal felt like. “You’re not the first and you’re not going to be the last. There are other kinds of treachery that cause just as much damage. I take it Penny found out and confronted you?”