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me a job?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t—”
    I held up a hand to stop him, a cold shudder coursing through me.
    “It’s no coincidence that I work for you, is it?” I asked. “My position here, with this foundation, was it somehow…engineered?”
    “It’s not that simple,” Tom said. “I…I created this foundation with you in mind, yes.”
    “With me in mind? What does that mean?”
    “I knew I wanted to hire you. I knew you were the right person for the job.”
    “A job you sought me out for,” I said. “Even before you hired me, you knew who I was, you knew all about my husband’s death, and in fact you knew the man who killed him.”
    “Yes.”
    I could feel my face burning with anger.
    “What about our relationship, Tom? Our personal relationship? Was that preordained too?”
    Tom surprised me by standing and going to the door and opening it. At first he didn’t answer my question. Then he said, “Kimball, could you excuse us for a minute?”
    “I don’t think—”
    “Please, just for a minute.”
    Without reply, the lawyer put the file back into the briefcase and stood.
    “I’ll be in the hall,” he said.

Five

    I listened as the door shut with a soft thud, leaving Tom and me alone in the room.
    “Do you remember Wendell Smythe?” he asked me suddenly. “My friend in Pennsylvania?”
    I thought back to last September, nine months ago, when Tom sent me to deliver a grant to a friend of his in Philadelphia. When I showed up with the check, I found the man dead on the floor behind his desk. As a favor to Tom, once Wendell’s death was classified as a homicide, I investigated and found his killer.
    “Yes, of course.”
    “Do you remember when you went to his funeral? How much it upset you?”
    I nodded. I could remember the whole thing vividly. Wendell’s widow, Marion, had arranged for a singer to perform the hymn “It Is Well” at the gravesite. Still grieving for my own late husband, it had been difficult for me to handle the funeral, but when that song began, I simply lost it. I sobbed my way through most of the service, crying not for Wendell’s survivors, whom I hardly knew, but for myself and my own loss, my own pain. It wasn’t until later that I learned Tom had also been at that funeral. He hadn’t identified himself or told me hello, he said later, because it didn’t seem like the right time. Though at that point we had become good friends through our phone conversations, we continued with only a long-distance relationship for some months more. He had left that day without ever telling me he was there.
    “Something happened to me at that funeral,” he said, sitting down in his chair.
    “Something happened?”
    “I fell in love with you,” he said. “I didn’t expect it. I didn’t want it. But at that point you and I were already such good phone friends. When I saw you in person, everything changed. But then I saw you crying so hard, and I knew this could never be.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because there was too much between us, too much that you couldn’t know.”
    I turned my face up toward the ceiling, wishing I could just reach down Tom’s throat and pull the truth out.
    “Then why did you come to see me at my home two months later?” I demanded. “Why did you come to me again when I was in North Carolina and sweep me off my feet?”
    “I couldn’t help myself, Callie. I fought it long and hard, but a part of me just wouldn’t let go. I thought if we could give our relationship a chance, maybe none of this other stuff would matter.”
    “But it does matter.”
    “Yes, it does. In my heart, I always knew it would.”
    “And so that’s the end of it. Of us.”
    He leaned forward onto the palms of his hands.
    “It doesn’t have to be.”
    “Tom, you are somehow connected with the death of my husband. Am I simply supposed to forget that, to go on through life without ever knowing what that connection was or what you had to do with it?”
    “I said I