“At first I hated her,” Hudson said. “She was, after all, my competition, at least as far as Paul’s time was concerned. He always had to go home to her. While she got to sleep with him beside her, I got to sleep by myself, wondering if he was touching her. Wondering if he was thinking about me,” he added.

“Eventually I just felt sorry for her,” he went on. “From what Paul told me, she seemed like a nice person. Even though I was the one her husband was cheating on her with, I didn’t like that he might be hurting her.” He smiled sadly. “Of course, I could afford to pity her, because Paul preferred me over her sexually. It’s not so hard to be compassionate when you’re the one partially to blame for the other person’s misery.”

Again he thought of Caddie, and of his part in her unhappiness. “Not that Paul wasn’t equally at fault, of course,” he said quickly. “But he made excuses. He couldn’t leave her because they had a child. He couldn’t leave her because of the complications of divorce and money and a million other things.”

He wanted badly to take up the wineglass and fortify himself with a drink, but after what he’d said to Ben, he didn’t feel he could. Instead he imitated Ben, stuffing his hands into his pockets and worrying the inner liner with his fingertips.

“I didn’t want him to leave her anyway,” he said. “I mean, I did. But only because I wanted to be the person who won.” It had taken him a long time to understand that about himself, and telling it to Ben didn’t make him feel any better about it. It was a terrible thing to realize about himself, that he could see another person as a prize to be taken away from the person who held it.

“I got used to the arrangement,” he said, glossing over the months of fighting and petulance that resulted in this truce. “And Paul seemed happy enough with it as well. Once he discovered the manuscript, we had a legitimate reason to spend a lot of time together. That made it easier. He told Emily I was his assistant, which I sort of was, really. She had no reason not to believe him.”

Now he was getting to the truly difficult part of his story. He’d already admitted to Ben that he hadn’t told the whole truth about his relationship with Paul. Ben, he thought, most logically assumed that he’d been hiding the fact that Paul had had a wife. But that was only part of it; the rest was far more difficult to tell.

“Paul didn’t die of cancer,” he said.