CHARLIE FELT HER PHONE buzz in her pocket. She sighed to herself. This was going to be interesting. There was no point asking Fortunata to keep the noise down; Charlie had tried before and failed.

“Hello?” she raised her voice.

“You’re in Mario’s,” Simon said immediately.

“Do you know any other cafés where the owner sings loud Italian arias all day long, making all the customers want to strangle her?”

“What are you doing there?”

“Waiting for Melissa Redgate. She refused to come to the station, for some reason.”

“I want to ask you something,” said Simon. “About Liv and Gibbs.”

“I’m trying not to think about them. How dare they sit there and tell us a barefaced lie about their stupid affair when we’ve spent years helping them bloody well get away with it? I bet Sellers knows the truth. He and Gibbs are blood brothers, aren’t they? Or, to be more accurate, sleaze brothers.”

“They’re lying, but Gibbs doesn’t want to,” said Simon. “He hates it. Liv loves it, though—in the restaurant the other night, she’d have spent the whole evening talking about the pretend separation if we’d been willing to indulge her.”

“We’re agreed they haven’t really split up, right? I mean, no way have they split. So why, suddenly, does Liv need us to believe they have?”

“A new fantasy?” Simon suggested. “This is what I’m getting at. Liv enjoys making things up. She enjoys fantasy. Gibbs prefers the reality, which is why he’d rather tell us the truth, whatever it is.”

“It’s the same as it always was. It must be: they’re sleeping together, and lying to their spouses.”

“No, something must have changed between them to spark off this breakup story.”

“I can hardly hear you,” Charlie said loudly in the hope that Fortunata would take the hint. “OK, so what’s the change? They’re not leaving Dom and Debbie, are they? What are the other possibilities?”

“Who cares? I only care about the difference in their characters: fantasist, realist. Gibbs’d leave Debbie and move in with Liv at the drop of a hat, wouldn’t he? She’d only have to say the word.”

“True,” Charlie agreed.

“He wants a real life with her, but she doesn’t. She wants to preserve her real life with Dom, and have her secret life with Gibbs, and lie about it!”

“So . . . what does that mean?” Charlie asked.

“It means I’m starting to understand something I didn’t before.”

“About Liv and Gibbs?”

“No. Well, yes, but no. By the way, I know why Damon Blundy wasn’t stabbed.”

The line went dead. Behind the counter, Fortunata switched from Madame Butterfly to Tosca. Charlie held her phone over her mug of tea and thought about dropping it in.

“Sergeant Zailer?”

She looked up. “Are you Melissa?”