Madeline didn’t know if the relief showed on her face or not, but she felt it. A wave passed through her, and despite the awful circumstances of Sophia’s death and the nausea she still felt over it, she didn’t want to talk about her own life, which was nowhere near as orderly and straightforward as the animal taxonomy she was learning about that semester.

Madeline thought about her answer. She wanted to be clear and, since she could, honest with the cops. “She talked about her job more than anything else. The one at the nonprofit. How they helped kids with literacy, which I thought was awesome since I’m an English major. And she talked about her house. I guess she’d just bought one and was fixing it up. It sounded like it needed a lot of work.”

“Did she talk about her husband?”

Madeline scanned through her memories of her conversations with Sophia and decided she didn’t have anything to lie about. “She didn’t.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

Wallace remained quiet and still. If the conversation between them came down to a waiting game, it was obvious to Madeline that Wallace would win. She looked like a guru, a Zen master, someone content to sit on that crappy-ass chair for hours at a time until Madeline said something, anything she could use. She looked perfectly at ease in the cramped attic apartment, not bothered by the stuffy air, the scattered books, the dirty laundry spilling out of the lone closet.

But Madeline held the line. If Wallace wanted to know what had happened at the party, she could ask. And if she wasn’t going to ask, Madeline wasn’t going to offer. And nothing really happened anyway. And how on earth could any of it be related to Sophia being murdered?

Could it?

Wallace broke the spell by asking, “Did Sophia ever say anything was wrong in her life?”

“To be perfectly honest, Detective, we mostly talked about me. Maybe I went on too much about my own issues.”

“She was a good friend, then.”

Madeline didn’t use the word “friend” lightly. Did it apply to Sophia? Was Madeline nauseated by her death and sleeping with the skillet next to her bed just because a woman had been murdered in Gatewood? Or was she feeling so distraught because she had known the person and cared about her?

She decided there was something real there. A real sense of loss. A real pain that stabbed her in the side and wouldn’t stop.