“Ready when you are.”

“Fine. Let’s start with the lawsuit and why I settled instead of fighting the good fight. I had a nervous breakdown when I was eighteen. The doctors decided on a diagnosis of clinical hysterical personality, derived from the Perley-Guze checklist: fifty-five symptoms, any twenty-five of which had to be present in at least nine of ten predetermined symptom groups. Can you believe this shit? I was having extended panic attacks that presented as psychotic breaks. I was in the hospital for two weeks and I came out on a cocktail of prescription medications. Once they got the mix right, I was fine. Chat therapy, of course, but that was more to benefit the psychiatric staff, composed of—guess what? All guys.”

“And that’s what Byrd-Shine came up with when they did the deep background on you?”

“Oh yes. They turned up the name of the hospital, admission and release dates, my doctors’ names, and all the drugs I was on.”

“How hard did they have to dig? You must have had friends willing to supply all the nitty-gritty details.”

“That was my assumption. None of my friends were sworn to secrecy, but I assumed I could trust their discretion. What a disappointment.”

“So what was the big deal? You spend two weeks in the hospital and then you’re fine. Where could Ned’s attorney go with that?”

“Character assassination. He’d paint me as a basket case—unstable, vindictive, and paranoid. I was suing Ned for emotional harm. All Ruffner had to do was to point out how nuts I was and Ned became the victim of my delusional state.”

“Didn’t you have proof he harassed and threatened you?”

“I had phone records, but no witnesses. I didn’t realize how carefully he set me up.”

“Meaning what?”

“I had all the notes he left on my car and my front porch and my mailbox and anyplace else he could think of that might unnerve me. You wanna know what the notes said? Things like ‘I love you.’ ‘Please forgive me.’ ‘You mean the world to me.’ ‘I wish you’d let me get close.’ I could see how it would look to a jury. I’d have been burned at the stake.”

“How’d you get involved with him in the first place?”

“We worked for the same company. I was marketing. He was outside sales.”

“Wasn’t that a no-no?”

“Yes and no. Generally, it was frowned on, but the policy wasn’t spelled out in any great detail. As long as we didn’t let the relationship impact our work, everybody looked the other way.”

“How long did you date him?”

“A year and a half. The first six months were great, then things started to get weird. Ned’s a photography buff, so he wanted to take pictures of me, which doesn’t sound bad on the face of it, but believe me, there was some kind of pathology at work. He insisted I wear this special outfit, along with a wig and makeup. I could see what he was up to: turning me into someone else. I’m just not sure who. He also had sliiightly kinky taste when it came to sex.”