Imani felt her shoulders drop from the tense position level with her clavicle. She smiled at him, remembering her earlier musing about perfunctory sex. Surely she was to blame for that as much as Philip. “Well, now that I’m here, I suppose I can put on a little show.”

A grin erased her husband’s prior expression. He patted the bed beside her. “The real thing is always better.”

Imani pulled off her top, momentarily forgetting what had urgently driven her home. Tonya was not seducing her husband at the moment. She was.

The shock of her arrival hadn’t completely calmed Philip. A few kisses to her breasts, a grab of her buttocks, and he was ready to perform. She concentrated on his face as they began, forcing herself to think only about the relationship between her movements and his expressions, what he liked, what made him lose control. Several times, she suffered a pang of guilt. Her friend was missing, and she was making love. Surely there was something callous about that. Something cruel. Each time she thought about it, she instructed Philip to go harder, bringing her back into the room. Real physical pain was always easier to bear than its emotional counterpart.

The session lasted longer than usual, perhaps because of everything else weighing on their minds. When it was done, they both went to the bathroom to wash off the sex and the lingering scent of spices. Philip got into the shower first. Imani talked to him while pinning up her hair.

“I learned something disturbing today,” she said, loud enough for Philip to hear beneath the spray. “Tonya knew Nate. Apparently, she auditioned for him several times. He wrote this glowing letter to get Layla into the school, and he was even paying for it. Layla attends St. Catherine’s because of a scholarship that he funded.”

A squirt from the shampoo bottle was the only response.

“It was disconcerting because I was talking to her about Melissa earlier today and specifically asked if she knew the Walkers. And she’d said no.”

Philip rubbed the soap over his hair. “Maybe she thought saying yes would indicate that they were friends, and she didn’t know them well.”

Imani stepped into the shower, appreciating the warm mist from the water on her goose-pimpled skin. “But you wouldn’t say you don’t know them, then; you’d say that you didn’t know them well.” She turned on the handheld shower hose and held it to her body. “And, judging from Nate’s letter, he knew her pretty well. He talked about her background.”

Philip dipped his head under the water.

“Why would she lie?”

“I don’t know if it’s a lie, exactly.” Philip’s words came out garbled from the spray in his mouth. “She probably wanted to avoid talking about him since it would lead to conversations about his death.”