She shrugged and walked into the room. “Fine. Weird. I don’t really have any idea, but I think he knows I know. Or at least, he suspects I might. He wants to talk when I get home.” She lowered herself into one of the armchairs in front of his desk.

“Do you know what you’ll do? Do you think you’ll really forgive him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have any idea. I don’t even know if that would be possible.”

He lowered his feet to the hardwood floor and came down off the top of his desk, moving around to the front so he could sit in the armchair next to hers. He handed her Clare’s book. “There is something about this book. I feel like the answers I’m looking for are here, but I’m not seeing it clearly.”

She turned the book over in her hands, ran her fingers over the book’s description and quoted praise. Halfway down, her fingers stopped. “Donna Mehan?” Eileen looked up at Simon with questions in her eyes. “She wrote a blurb for A Perfect Life?” she asked, pointing to the quoted text. “I thought, after what happened in Brooklyn, they hated each other now?”

He knit his brows. He hadn’t ever understood how the praise from Donna had come to be for this book. “As far as I know, they did. When the finished book released, and I saw that…I never got a straight answer from either Clare or her editor. Only that Clare had reached out to Donna personally with an advanced copy of the book. Apparently Donna read the book and well…” He shrugged. “As you can see, she had nothing but gushing praise for the work.”

“Her old roommate?”

“The same.”

“Did they make up or something?”