Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

I met Nadia just as she was closing her car door. When I explained who I was and why I was there, she scrunched her face, displeased. I assumed she was also displeased to drive up and see me speaking to her husband. For a moment, she said nothing, and I thought she was going to refuse to talk to me. Then she opened the back door of the car, grabbed her coat, and threw it on, suggesting we go for a walk.

After we’d rounded the corner, she looked at me and said, “I heard Owen’s mother hired you.”

News spread fast around this place.

“Are you two still seeing each other?” I asked.

“We’re talking, not sleeping together, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“I wasn’t implying anything. Does your husband know the two of you are still in communication?”

“If he does, he hasn’t asked me about it.”

He may not have wanted to ask about it, but I did.

“Why are you still in contact with Owen?”

She gave me a snarky look, as if the reason should be obvious to me, which it wasn’t.

“The guy just lost his wife,” she said.

“A wife he was planning on divorcing.”

“Getting a divorce doesn’t mean he no longer cared for her. He just got tired of trying, I guess. I don’t blame him.”

“When I talked to Owen about the affair, he acted like it was just a fling, no big deal. He never thought it would last.”

She raised a brow. “He said it was a fling, did he? Well, that’s news to me.”

“How so?”

“The last conversation we had right before his wife died, he made a comment about being able to pursue me once he was divorced. He wanted me to leave my husband.”

“What did you say?”

“I said no. The affair was a temporary distraction, nothing more.”

Funny.

They’d both said similar things about their dangerous liaison.

Was one of them was lying?

Or were they lying to each other?

Or maybe a little of both?

“What did Owen say when you told him you had no intention of leaving your husband?” I asked.

“He threw a fit at first, and then he got … weird.”

“How so?”

“The next time we saw each other, he spent the entire time backpedaling, saying the same thing to me that I’d said to him—the affair wasn’t a big deal, it was never going to amount to anything, it was just a bit of fun, that kind of thing. He acted like the decision to call it off was his idea, and it wasn’t.”

“Did he talk about Claire when you were together?”

She shook her head. “We decided at the start not to discuss our spouses. Seemed like a disrespectful thing to do to our partners.”

Disrespectful.

Like an affair wasn’t.

I supposed we had different ideas about the definition of the word disrespectful .

In my view, they’d disrespected their spouses the moment they hooked up.

“How long ago did the affair end?” I asked.

“What did Owen say?”

“Why does it matter?”

“I suppose it doesn’t. We stopped seeing each other, you know, in an intimate way, oh, about a month ago, give or take.”

“And how many times have you seen him since?”

“Not at all … until I found out about his wife. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about him, so we met up and talked.”

“How did he seem about Claire’s death?”

“Torn up.”

“The police think he killed her.”

She stopped, bent down, and tied her shoe.

Then she faced me.

“I know what they think, and I’ll tell you right now, they have it all wrong,” she said. “Owen’s the kindest, gentlest soul I’ve ever known. You better find out who did it, because it wasn’t him.”

Nadia pivoted and then took off toward her house, leaving me standing there, thinking about what she’d just said about Owen being a kind, gentle soul.

She may have wanted me to believe she saw the affair as a temporary one, but she sure didn’t sound like someone who wanted the affair to be over.