Page 65 of Over Her Dead Body

“That has never been a requirement.”

I lean back. “Is this professional concern?”

“It isn’t concern. I’m protecting the house from an awkward holiday party.”

“Very civic-minded.”

“Someone has to stop you from sleeping with a client. We’ve all seen how that version of the termination email ends.”

“Usually with the man keeping the client and the woman updating LinkedIn?”

“Exactly.”

It seems like too much to tell him he’s already too late with the warning.

I scan the search results again. “He looks like Reid.”

Owen goes quiet. When he finally speaks, his voice is careful. “Your husband?”

“I only had the one.”

“I’ve seen pictures. Hale looks a little like him.”

I stop scrolling. “A little?”

“Enough that I understand why you noticed. Not enough that I understand why you’re researching him at two in the morning.”

Owen has seen Reid in photographs. I watched Reid brush his teeth for seven years.

There are things photographs do not preserve. The way a man favors one shoulder when he is tired. Which hand he uses to turn a glass. The expression that crosses his face when he has decided to lie but has not yet chosen the lie.

“You haven’t slept,” Owen says. “You missed Vienna, came home from somewhere you won’t discuss, and looked at Hale as if he’d walked out of a grave.”

“That is very dramatic.”

“It was a dramatic look.”

I lower the laptop screen a few inches. “You think I’m losing my mind?”

“I think you need sleep.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“And yet, you’re conducting a background search in formalwear.”

“I took off my shoes.”

“That changes everything.”

I almost smile.

“I can come over,” he says.

“To supervise?”

“To keep you company. Make coffee. I’m not sleeping either.”

He says company, and Santa Fe comes back with it. Sixteen seconds in an elevator. His hand at the small of my back. Three years of pretending neither of us wondered what might have happened if one of us had followed the other out.