“Did you like Ben?” Marge asked softly.

“Sure I liked him. I loved him.” She slouched back into the oversized sailcloth chair. Her voice dropped to a hush. “I don’t think he liked me all that much. I mean, what kind of man marries a woman who fucks around on him?”

No one answered.

“You want my opinion? He filled his life with all these obligations to avoid me. To avoid sex. I don’t think he liked sex. At least not with me.”

“Maybe he was gay,” Oliver said. “Why else would he avoid sex with someone as gorgeous as you?”

That got a genuine smile. Every so often Oliver would do something like that and Marge remembered why she worked with him.

Melinda said, “I thought about that. I doubt if he had someone on the side—man or woman. His work and his extracurricular activities took up all his time.”

“Could he have been lying about some of his activities?” Marge asked her.

“He was always available for my phone calls. And he always left me his schedule—just in case. When I phoned him, he took my calls right away. Maybe he was wrestling with his sexual demons. Maybe that’s why he scheduled himself so tightly…so he wouldn’t have time to fool around.”

Marge said, “And in the meantime, you were home alone with two little boys making demands and no help. I’m a mother. I know it’s not easy.”

“Especially because I was on a very tight allowance…because of my ‘problem.’” She made quotation marks around the word with her fingers. “I had to beg for every dollar just like a kid. It was demeaning!”

“Who controlled the purse strings?” Decker asked. “Mom or Ben?”

“Both. Ben did the weekly grocery shopping, he bought clothes and supplies for the boys, he paid the bills, he paid all the expenses.” She gave a wry smile. “I was allowed to shop for my own clothing, but Ben had to account for every dollar spent or else Mom would take away my trust fund. That didn’t give me lot of latitude for my recreation.”

“By recreation do you mean gambling?” Oliver asked.

She picked up her coffee and took a gulp. It was lukewarm by now. “Everyone was so afraid that I couldn’t control my gambling that I started gambling just to prove them wrong. That’s when I got into deep debt.”

“How’d you pay it off?”

Melinda turned to Decker and raised an eyebrow. “I was creative. A couple of times I managed to forge Ben’s signature and withdrew my own money.”

“Did Ben find out?”

“If he did, he didn’t tell me about it. Maybe he was secretly glad. All this responsibility of taking care of me…I think it was a burden. And every so often, I’d win big at the tables and refill the coffers.”