Lusar looked at Marta Valent, then turned to face the wall. Parisi leaned on the back of Teresa’s chair.

“Did you see that, Superintendent?” he whispered.

Teresa lifted her hand to invoke his silence. She had indeed noticed that gesture, but the answer to her question lay elsewhere.

“Proxemics,” she told the two agents, pointing at the screen. “The science that allows us to interpret the distance people put between themselves and others. There is always a significance to the length of that distance, and this is certainly no exception.”

She continued to observe them.

“Though they maintain otherwise, Marta Valent and Cristian Lusar are no strangers to each other.”

That was what the distance between them had revealed. Their bodies had been separated by no more than a few inches, and even that space had been reduced briefly to nothing when they had brushed against each other in a seemingly involuntary gesture. It wasn’t a proximity imposed by the circumstances they found themselves in, but a consequence of the trajectory they had unconsciously chosen as they switched positions inside the room. It was a distance that could be considered intimate, reserved to people we know and trust—not to nighttime intruders, or potential killers. It was the distance of embraces and shared breaths.

When Teresa had first met Valent’s widow in her home, the woman had been fidgeting obsessively with the wedding band on her ring finger. Teresa could see now how that wedding band represented a union that existed in name only.

Marini led Marta Valent into the room where Teresa was waiting. He walked back out with Parisi and De Carli and shut the door.

“The two of you are lovers, aren’t you?” Teresa asked point blank.

The woman opened her mouth as if to protest, then closed it again.

“Don’t make things worse,” Teresa warned her. “I already know.”

Teresa finally understood why the photograph she had seen in Marta Valent’s house depicted a glowing, cheerful young woman, and why that same woman now looked like a shadow of her former self. At first Teresa had ascribed the change to sickness. But now she understood: it was guilt.

The woman’s eyes shone with tears.

“Cristian didn’t do it,” she said, crying. “And neither did I.”

“And why should I trust you? You’ve lied to me before.”

“What did you expect me to say, with my son and my mother-in-law in the house?”

“You had plenty of other chances to speak; you only had to make your mind up. You could have called me at any point over the past few days.”

The woman’s hands were fussing with a tissue that she’d reduced to shreds. Teresa handed her a fresh one and waited for the tears to subside. When they finally did, the woman looked at Teresa with resignation.

“Will everyone find out now?” she asked. “I’m worried about the child.”