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dotting the i's and crossing the't's necessary to close the business down. He'd asked her whether she wanted to go through Vin's office but she declined, so he'd packed up several large boxes and had them delivered to the house.
    Mark had also called from time to time but he kept saying that she could let any investigating slide, so she kept putting it off. What if she found that he'd been doing something illegal? What if he'd been being blackmailed or something? What if any of the things she signed in ignorance would get her into some kind of trouble? She was sure that whatever she found wouldn't make her happy and so she delayed, and delayed, and delayed.
    It was now almost four months since Vin's death and she was surprised at how little she'd mourned. She was sad, and confused, and lonely, but she kept waiting for the deep pit of grief that she thought she ought to be feeling. Day after day she examined her soul, but that misery just wasn't there. She wasn't happy, but she wasn't devastated, either. The membership at the country club had another six months to run and the people had been supportive and urged her to get back into the swing of things, so she'd slowly begun doing some of the things she'd done before.
    She spent her days playing bridge, which bored her a little, and had quickly gotten back to her work with her favorite charities. In the beginning she'd joined because Vin insisted that mingling with the rich and dedicated would be good for his image, but from the beginning she'd enjoyed the work: keeping up with mailing lists, designing Web sites, and particularly planning fundraising functions for anywhere from a dozen to several hundred people, a skill she honed with the frequent gatherings she organized for Vin. She became a prominent hostess, someone a group could come to. Occasionally she donated the use of her home and she quickly discovered that she was good at that kind of enterprise and earned a lot of praise from those around her. No one questioned the fact that since Vin's death, although she donated her time, she no longer wrote large checks to the various organizations.
    At first the women she worked with were solicitous and careful not to mention Vin, but eventually they began to treat her easily. None of the women were friends, exactly, but they were familiar. The women she'd been close to earlier when they lived in White Plains all had children and they had less and less in common, so they eventually drifted apart. Real friends, people she could talk to about serious things like feelings and fears, didn't exist.
    Now that she had a little distance from her husband she found she was able to organize her thoughts and think more clearly about her marriage. Who was this man she had been married to for all those years? Did she know him? As she thought about it she realized that, over the past few years, they'd led separate lives, intertwined yet distant, twin circles with only tiny overlaps.
    Vin had his business and it had taken inordinate amounts of his time. He was seldom home before ten or eleven, attending business dinners, taking prospective clients to sporting events and Broadway shows, working on campaigns until all hours. Of course they often entertained together and she had learned to love Broadway, although sports still left her cold so Vin went on forays to Yankees or Knicks games without her.
    Did she love him?
How did that question get into my brain?
she asked herself as she finished her shower one morning. However it got there, it was a valid question, one she could now think about with some objectivity. Love? She wasn't sure she knew what the word meant. Didn't love include trust? She been worried for months that he'd been doing something illegal and so she'd put off looking through his things for fear she'd find out something she didn't want to know. But wouldn't she jump to his defense if she loved him? Wouldn't she immediately and vigorously deny that he could have been doing