“It was hard,” Quinn replied, without skipping a beat. “And horrifying. I could barely do it. Like, you know, I’ve only seen a dead person once before. My nana when I was seventeen. She didn’t answer when I rang the bell at her apartment, so I let myself in. I found her tipped over in her chair, the newspaper still in her lap. She’d been doing the crossword puzzle.” A long pause. “But of course this was nothing like that. Because he died . . .” There was silence on the line for a few moments. Then Quinn cleared her throat and continued, her voice strained. “Blunt-force trauma, they said. I don’t even know what that means.”

“But at least you got to see him,” Emily pressed. She had to know if Quinn had identified the body. “How did he look?”

“He looked, I don’t know, peaceful. You found him, so you know.”

The rolled-up area rug had been lying in a puddle of water. All she could see were pale gray fingers. Then, later, the corpse mercilessly exposed under the spotlights. Peaceful would not have been the word Emily would have chosen.

Quinn added, “At least they let me have some time alone with him. I felt terrible leaving him in the morgue. It was so cold there, I felt like I needed to cover him up. Is that weird?” She gave a bitter laugh. “You know I wasn’t happy being married to him, but I didn’t want this.”

“It must be hard,” Emily said. Empty words, she knew.

“Emmy, we’re still going to finish what we talked about, right? I don’t want you to think I’m going to just let it go.”

“I . . . uh . . .” Emily stammered, not sure what to say. Because she wanted as little as possible to do with Quinn Newell, even if she offered to pay ten times their usual rate. “Seems like now’s not the best time for you to be making any major decisions. I’ll return your deposit first thing.”

“Not at all. Now we can do the whole house. It will be a piece of cake; I really don’t care about any of it. Then I won’t have to be reminded everywhere that I wasn’t welcome. It wasn’t just my stuff in the garage. Wally hogged the bed. Hogged the comforter. Filled the medicine cabinet with his stuff. We had to get his brand of coffee. His—”

“Quinn,” Emily said, interrupting the flow of bile. She hoped Ryan had kept Quinn from venting like this to the police. “I’m not a psychologist, but I think you should wait. A few weeks, at least, and—”

“I don’t want to wait. And I’m counting on the help you promised.”

Petulant. Entitled. Needy. Impulsive. “Quinn, let’s talk about it some more later, okay? After the funeral?”