Read Dead Certain for Free Online

to me that it had come to this. In November it would be six years since my husband Russell died of brain cancer, a year for every month that we were married. What would he have thought of the mess I’d made with Stephen and Elliott and all the rest of it?
    In my heart I prayed he’d have understood. Russell, even when he knew he was dying, believed the world was an enormous place, filled with limitless possibilities. The son of a Polish immigrant, a tailor who read philosophy at night and named his son after the philosopher Bertrand Russell, he’d laughed out loud as he’d swept me up the aisle after we’d said “I do.” Later, on the church steps, as the four hundred guests strewed our way with rose petals, I’d asked him what he’d found so funny. He’d stretched his arms wide, taking it all in, the top hats and the limousines, his mother with her fresh perm and prim polyester dress standing beside my mother in her Givenchy, both women quietly sobbing. “If this isn’t Proof that God has a sense of humor,” he’d declared, “then I don’t know what is.”
    I’d spent six years trying not to ask what God was thinking when he’d given my husband brain cancer, six years filled with work and obligation spent trying not to think of how it all might have turned out differently. Russell had been dead two years before I was tempted back into Stephen Azorini’s bed, but from the beginning I viewed it as an accommodation rather than an act of betrayal.
    For a long time it had somehow seemed to work. Stephen was as committed to building his company as I was to my practice. Social obligations were strictly quid pro quo with the difference worked out in bed. On the surface we were the quintessential power couple, accomplished, photogenic (at least in Stephen’s case), and unencumbered by the inconvenience of obligation or emotion.
    I don’t know what I was thinking when I agreed to move in with him. Certainly as an attorney I should have known better, but I think I was just dazzled by the view.
    In the hundred years since the building had been erected, the apartment had come on the market only twice. A Gold Coast duplex with lake views in three directions, its first owners had been my grandparents, who’d commissioned David Adler, the legendary architect, to design the interior. I’d lived there until I was six years old and my parents decided to forsake the excitement of the city for the sylvan pleasures of suburban Lake Forest. Convinced we’d never have the chance again, we wrote the check and embarked on a yearlong renovation. The only trouble was that by the time the plaster was dry, I knew that I would never live there with Stephen.
    But as any lawyer will tell you, things only get more complicated when you start picking them apart. It had taken two months of negotiations to buy back Stephen’s half of the apartment, longer still to straighten out the mess of contractors’ bills and decorator’s invoices. It was like going through a divorce without the benefit of ever having been married, and in the end the whole thing had left me emotionally exhausted.
    So for now the big apartment on the lake sat empty and perfect, like a layout for Architectural Digest. For now, I was in no hurry to move in. The idea of taking up residence in a two-story apartment the size of a large house was going to take some getting used to. Besides, I’d agreed to stay on in the Hyde Park apartment with Claudia until her fellowship was over at the end of June. Her dream job was already waiting for her, a faculty appointment at Columbia’s medical school.
    I hoisted myself wearily to my feet and dragged myself back into the dining room. If the fact that I already have my dream job isn’t proof that God had a sense of humor, I told myself, nothing else is.
    I poured myself the last of the wine and gave myself over to the documents my mother had sent me. When I first started out at the firm, my old mentor, John Gutt-man, used to