“It wasn’t just a financial arrangement or a dare, it was an attack on me. In a sense, he had me beaten no matter what I did. Following the course I did, I forfeited the money and vindicated his judgment of me. But as long as I stayed single, the four hundred dollars came in unmarked envelopes—not ever a return address on them. He bought bank checks, wrapped them in plain, cheap paper, and mailed them to me. There was never a covering letter, a greeting, a question about how I was doing. It was an abuse, after the years we had spent together, and as long as I accepted the checks, I submitted to it.”

“I don’t fully understand,” Leland said.

“I know you don’t. Your appearance the other day brought back many of the things about Colin that I had thought I had succeeded in pushing away. There’s no success in that. You have to go through and come out on the other side. I didn’t really want to do that with Murray five years ago.” She looked at Leland. “I really haven’t slept since Tuesday—you know, a few minutes here and there, a nap after lunch. I’m not afraid of death, I expect it, but since Tuesday, with all these things churning up, and not wanting to hurt Murray again by mentioning them, I’ve been having some terrible thoughts. I’ll get close to sleeping and I’ll think about the way we were at the beginning, Colin and I, and then, all of a sudden, I’ll think about making love to him, the physical thing, and the fact that he’s dead, both things together, and it’s as if he starts dying in my arms. When my father died and the mortuary people moved him from his bed to the stretcher—I had to watch though they told me not to—his head fell back and his mouth opened. You’ve seen dead men. I feel Colin’s dead face pressed against mine. It happens when I’m on the edge of sleep. I know it means that I’m trying to blame myself, probably not for his death, but for the failure of our marriage. Was he happy in his second marriage?”

“I don’t know what you want to hear,” Leland said. “My opinion doesn’t mean much.”

“Just tell me the truth. Please.”

“As nearly as I can tell, he was very happy. It’s one of the things that’s so strange about his death. I think you should know that he didn’t talk about you. He tried to get his first marriage behind him. Everything I’ve learned about his second marriage tells me he was very happy indeed, and very much in love.”

“Surgery without anesthetic,” she said. “I was trying to flatter myself.”

“You said you knew things about him that he didn’t know himself. What did you have in mind?”

“Maybe you know them already,” she said.

“Try me.”