“Oh please, no details,” I said in haste. “Had to be about control, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely. And that was just the beginning. He became obsessed with what I did and who I saw and whether I talked to friends about him, which I didn’t. I didn’t dare. He checked phone bills and read my mail. If I mentioned someone else at work—male or female—he was all over it. ‘What did you talk about?’ ‘How much time did you spend?’ ‘If everything was so innocent, why wasn’t I included?’ On and on it went.

“He’s the master of escalation. Any protest I made, any step I took to protect myself, he upped the ante. At one point I got a temporary restraining order, and you know what he did? He called the police and claimed I’d thrown a pipe wrench that hit him in the head. He was bloody and he had a knot the size of my fist, but he did it to himself.”

“The police actually showed up?”

“Of course. I was arrested and put in handcuffs. I spent eight hours in jail until I got someone to post bail. After that, at the slightest provocation, he’d threaten me with the cops.”

“And you were still working with him?”

“Uh, no. What happened was I went to my boss and told him what was going on. I got fired. Ned got promoted.”

“Can we talk about the settlement? I don’t mean to put you in an awkward position.”

She dismissed that. “Not a problem. Honestly. I’ve thought about it and I can’t see that I’d be in jeopardy even if you broadcast details, which I don’t think you’d do. At the time, Ned scared the shit out of me, but I see now he was more frightened of me than I was of him. The settlement was seventy-five.”

“Thousand?” I asked in disbelief.

She nodded.

I said, “Oh, man. That’s not good. If you’d told me five grand, I’d have said it was a token payment, Ned trying to get you out of his hair. Seventy-five thousand sounds like a payoff motivated by guilt. He must have thought you had him by the short hairs, or why cough up that much?”

“Not my attorney’s response. He told me it was a good deal. More than I’d have gotten from a jury even if they’d sided with me, which he didn’t think they would. He urged me to take it.”

“I’ll bet he did. He wanted to make sure you could pay his bill, which must have been substantial.”

“He took fifteen thousand off the top.”

“How does Pete fit into this? You said he showed up a year ago.”

“He came to apologize.”

The four words were not what I’d expected. “Apologize? For what?”

“You won’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

“Okay, so here it is: Pete told me Morley Shine got drunk one night and admitted he’d broken into my psychiatrist’s office. That’s how he got the information. He photocopied my file and turned everything over to Ned’s attorney. Of course it was illegal, immoral, and unethical, but what good did that do me? Pete had felt guilty about it for years and he wanted to set the record straight.”