Jessica smiles weakly and turns her eyes to the floor. “He made it seem like a date. Funny, isn’t it? That a husband would purposefully make a business meeting sound like a date when talking to his wife?” She laughs and smooths her white skirt with her perfectly manicured hands. “I suppose it’s also funny that I trust what you’re telling me more than I trust what he says. But then, you don’t seem to make a sport of hurting me. That makes you a more reliable source.”

I let her statement hang in the air between us for a moment before scooting my chair a little closer to hers. “Has he ever raised a hand to you, Jessica?”

Jessica looks up quickly. “No one’s ever asked me that.”

“Has he?”

She sucks in a sharp breath and looks away. “Once. He was . . . frustrated with me. Perhaps I was genuinely being frustrating . . . So hard to remember how these things start. But then he slapped me. Open hand, not a bruise to speak of. He just slapped me to get me in hand.”

“To get you ‘in hand,’ ” I repeat.

Again Jessica laughs. “The way you say it . . . it all sounds so ominous. But that slap has never bothered me much. If another man had slapped me like that I could still love him. It’s the poison in his words . . . That’s what I can’t recover from.”

“Does he trust you?” I ask.

This time her laughter fills the room.

“But he used to trust you,” I press, “back in the beginning?”

The memory seems to quiet her. “Yes,” she finally says. “Once upon a time in a land far, far away.”

He trusted you when you lived in Brooklyn Heights, I think. Back when he asked you to testify against my mother and rewarded you with marriage into the family. Or is Brooklyn now a land far, far away?

But to her face I smile. “What would he do if you gave up his secrets now?”

She furrows her brow as if confused by the question.

“He’s awful to you,” I continue. “Surely you’ve thought about hitting back at least once. You don’t have a lot of ammunition and you’re not built for a brawl. But every woman knows how to spill a secret. Just some embarrassing little detail whispered into the ear of the wife of some business associate? Just enough to make him squirm a little. God knows he’s earned it.”

The perpetually foggy expression Jessica wears clears; her eyes seem to sharpen as her mouth sets in a thin line.

“He’d kill me,” she says simply.

“I didn’t mean that you would have to spill a big secret . . . or even that he would ever have to find out that you were the leak . . .”