I don’t think about it much myself. I don’t see the point.

So there you have it, I wrapped up for D.D. My husband was not a wife beater or child abuser. Just a gambling addict who’d gotten in way over his head. And maybe I should’ve done more about that sooner. Cut him off. Kicked him out.

I hadn’t known about the credit cards he’d opened in Sophie’s name. I hadn’t known about his skimming of union funds. There was a lot I hadn’t known, but that didn’t make me culpable. Just made me a typical wife, wishing fruitlessly that my husband would walk away from the card tables and come home to me and my child instead.

“Sorry,” he’d told me, dying in our kitchen. “Tessa … love you more.”

I dream of him, you know. Not something I can tell Detective Warren. But I dream of my husband, except this time he is Good Brian, and he is holding my hand in his and Sophie is riding ahead of us on her bike. We walk. We talk. We are happy.

I wake up sobbing, which makes it just as well that I don’t sleep much anymore.

Want to know how much the lieutenant colonel made in the end? According to D.D., internal affairs recovered one hundred thousand dollars in his account. Ironically, a mere fraction of what he would’ve received in legitimate retirement benefits if he’d just done his job conscientiously, then taken up fishing in Florida.

The lieutenant colonel had ordered my husband’s death, and lost money in the process.

They hadn’t been able to recover the rest of the funds. No record in Shane’s accounts and no record in Brian’s. According to D.D., internal affairs believed that both men had gambled away their illicit gains at the casino, while Hamilton had saved his share of the scam. Ironically, their bad habit meant Shane and Brian would never be charged in the crime, while Hamilton and his girlfriend Bonita—who’d been positively ID’d as the female who’d closed out the shell company’s bank account—would posthumously shoulder the blame.

Good news for Shane’s widow, I thought, and good news for me.

I heard later that Shane was buried with full honors. The police determined that he must have agreed to meet with Purcell in the back alley. Purcell had overpowered him, then killed him, maybe to eliminate Shane, just as he’d eliminated Brian.

Purcell’s murder remains open, I’ve been told, the weapon having yet to be recovered.

As I explained to Detective D. D. Warren, I don’t know nothing about anything, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.