“No.”

He grabbed me around the waist, and we hugged tight.

“Drink?” he said.

“Definitely.”

We made our way through the crowd to the bar, said hello to a few people and ordered two glasses of wine.

As we waited for our drinks, I looked around the place. “Oh!” I said, when my eyes landed at the far corner.

A table had been set up there, and on top of it, leaning against the wall, was a blown-up head shot of Jane. In it, she wore a crisp white blouse and a gold braided necklace. She was laughing in the photo, her eyes sparkling. I thought of her, just a few nights ago, outside on the patio, saying, When someone tells you you’re beautiful, you act like it’s the first time you’ve heard that. Because you never know when it’ll be the last.

Tears flooded my eyes.

Q handed me a glass of wine. “Sip this.”

I gulped it instead, wanting something to tamp down the emotion that coursed through me as I looked at that photo.

On the table beside the picture were two scrapbooks, filled with what looked to be pictures of Jane. Many, I guessed, taken by Zac.

Q looked from me to the scrapbooks and back. “Let’s talk about something else for a second. How’s the twenty-one-year-old?”

“In Mexico.”

“Oh, honey, is that what he told you? That’s the oldest excuse in the book for not calling.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Train wreck. Told you.”

I gave him a withering look.

I kept glancing at the table with the scrapbooks, debating whether I could handle looking at them, when I noticed that Zac, grim-faced, hands in his pockets, was standing near the table. He was speaking to a short woman with dark hair who was flipping through the books, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex.

Zac wore his slim black suit with a white shirt and thin black tie. I could tell the suit was expensive, even from far away. He looked around the crowd, and then his eyes landed on me. For a second, he didn’t seem to recognize me, but then he nodded and started walking toward me.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to Q.

I pushed my way through the crowd until I met up with Zac. Up close I could see his face was ragged, the skin around his eyes more heavily lined than when I had seen him a few days before.

“Zac,” I said, “I’m Izzy McNeil. I met you at your house on Saturday when-” I faltered for a second “-when Jane found that stuff. And we talked that morning. And I-”

“I know who you are,” Zac interrupted me. He didn’t say anything then, he just looked at me with those anguished eyes. “You found her.”

I nodded. I saw Jane again-the white suit spattered red, the pool of blood behind her head. “Yeah, it was…” How to describe? “It was horrible.”

He started to say something but his words caught on tears, it sounded like. He shook his head a little and closed his eyes momentarily.

“I’m really sorry for your loss.” I hated saying stuff like that at a funeral. Such words always sounded cliché.

Zac shook his head. We were silent for a beat. Then he spoke. “I need to ask you something. When you were out with Jane last week…”

“Yes?” I prompted him to finish.

He shook his head again, as if he’d changed his mind. His eyes narrowed, and I thought I saw his emotion sway from anguish to anger in that one instant.

“What? Please ask me. Say whatever you were going to say, please, because…” My glance drifted over Zac’s shoulder and landed on the photo of Jane. I felt those tears leaping into my eyes again.

Zac saw them. “Let’s move over here.”

We stepped aside into a corner.

“You were out with her Friday night,” Zac said. “And when I called you the next day, I mentioned her…” His laugh was harsh. “What did she call them? Her dalliances,” he said bitterly. “You know what I mean.”

I didn’t know what to say. Jane said that she told Zac everything, that he knew everything about her, but what was everything? Should I admit I knew what he was talking about?

I simply nodded. I thought about Jane telling me how Zac was sick of her affairs, that he wasn’t so understanding anymore. Suddenly, I wanted to ask Zac, Were you so angry you couldn’t take it anymore? Did you kill your wife?

Within the last six months, I’d developed a suspicious nature, which had settled inside me and taken up residence. I’d gone from being someone who thought the best of everyone to someone with a wariness that sometimes leapt up and surprised me. I didn’t like that about myself. It made me feel much older than my twenty-nine (okay, nearly thirty) years.

“She didn’t talk to many people about what she did,” Zac said. “Her dalliances. Why you?”

“I’m not sure. Jane and I had always liked each other. And we became closer when she asked me to work for Trial TV.”

His eyes moved back and forth, as if they were mining my face for some other meaning behind my words. “Closer. Yeah.” He chuckled, but there was no mirth behind it. “You worked for Forester Pickett.”

I nodded, surprised at the topic shift. “I did,” I said with pride. “Forester was a friend of mine.”

“And your fiancé disappeared about the time Forester died, right?” It sounded accusatory somehow.

“Yes.”

“And you’re a lawyer.”

“Yeah.” And I feel like you’re taking my deposition.

“So you know how to evade them?”

“Evade who?”

“The cops. You know how to talk to them, how a murder investigation works.” The tone of Zac’s words was severe, and again he sounded as if he was accusing me of something.

“I don’t do criminal law,” I said, as if that explained everything. But really, I had no idea what he was getting at.

He was staring at me so intently now it was disconcerting. “What happened Friday night?”

I felt my grief shift to anxiety. Zac was standing in front of me, my back to the corner of the room, and I suddenly had the feeling of being trapped there. “What do you mean?”

“Where did Jane stay that night?”

I raised my glass and swallowed another gulp of wine. What to tell him? Zac obviously knew about Jane’s affairs, but to tell him specifically about Friday, about Jane going home with the writer seemed wrong. A friend’s secrets are always a secret. Even if that friend was no longer alive.

“I’m not sure.”

“Why were you so evasive when I called Saturday morning?”

He was making this hard. How to tell him that I was trying to cover up for his wife, and I was dealing with my first one-night stand, with a guy who was still in my house when he called? I thought of Theo then, and despite the setting, I felt my insides twist with passion. Never had a guy been able to cause such an intense reaction in me. Not even Sam.

“I…I…” I looked over his shoulder at the bar. There was Q. I gave him a look I knew he would read as Help.

“I know where Jane stayed,” Zac said when I looked back at him.

“You do?”

“Yeah,” he said. “She stayed with you.”