It was clear that she was not going to continue without encouragement from him. “You’re raising questions. I don’t want to be unpleasant, but if MacIver was the one who wanted to marry originally, how was he able to say at the time you were breaking up that you would remarry quickly? How could he be sure enough of that to offer you a lot of money to stay single? You said that it was a dare. I’ve had indications that it was a very expensive dare for him to make.”

“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.”