I know her game. Anyone with a double-digit IQ would. “But you felt compelled to,” I say.

She looks at me strangely, unsure if I have just mocked her or lauded her. She chooses lauded.

“That’s right, Adam. It’s all right that I call you Adam?”

“It’s my name,” I say. “So, yeah, it’s fine.” I force a little smile, a grim one, but a smile nevertheless. She responds with her practiced look of concern, and we’re off.

“Frank Flynn called me and said some really horrific things,” she starts out. “Really horrific. I’m just dumbfounded. Really I am. What he said was so damning yet so utterly not true that I had to come over and see you. I didn’t bring the camera guy. I would have. But we can do something later. This is more personal. More private. Just you and me.”

“Go on,” I say, setting down my coffee cup so I can feel the full force of what Frank Flynn had to say.

She sets down her cup like it’s a piece in a chess game.

“He said that you and your wife were having marital problems.”

I don’t even flinch. I let her words end in a long beat of silence. I want her to shovel out everything that she thinks she knows about Sophie and me.

“An affair,” she finally says.

I drink coffee. It’s my move. I answer truthfully. “I didn’t have an affair.” Carrie didn’t rise anywhere near that level. She barely rose above whacking off into a sock.

“He was pretty adamant that you did,” she goes on. “Said that you and Sophie hadn’t gotten along for years and that you were seeing someone from work.”

“If you knew who I worked with,” I say, “you wouldn’t even think that.”

She clearly doesn’t know how to deal with my retort. Again I let the air stay stagnant, silent, between us. In the bright light of the kitchen, without the benefit of makeup and filters, her face is a shrinking balloon. I see a plastic surgery scar behind one of her ears when she leans down to check out something interesting in the bottom of her coffee cup.

The pause is so effective.

“He said that you were there when Sophie’s body was found,” she says.

“I was,” I say. “Within a few minutes anyway. So were a lot of people. It was on Facebook, which, by the way, is close to putting the likes of you out of business.”

Linda flutters her lashes and shakes her head. She’s pretending that my remark has hurt her feelings. I know it hasn’t. I know that every day she gets on Facebook and massages her page like it’s her last chance for relevancy.

She pushes. “Don’t you think it’s even a little strange that you were there?”