“You mean like lovers?”
“Like anything.”
“Greg and Cecelia,” Emily mused. “Who knows?”
Myron tried another avenue. “When was the last time you heard from Greg?”
“When he ran off for Cambodia or wherever.”
“Laos. That was five years ago.”
“Something like that.”
“And not a word after that?”
“No,” she said softly. “Not a word.”
He couldn’t tell whether that bothered her or not.
“Look, Myron, Greg and I... it was a strange relationship. We got divorced years ago after, well” — she gestured with her hand in Myron’s direction — “you know.”
He did.
“But Jeremy was still a sick kid, even after the transplant, and whatever issues Greg had... has?... damn, which is it? Whichever, he loved that boy, even after...”
And there it was.
After Myron’s clumsy senior-year proposal, Emily dumped Myron for, you guessed it, Greg Downing. To raise the heartache to the tenth power, she and Greg fell so hard for one another that they got engaged four months later.
That was where it got messy.
Put simply, the night before the wedding, Emily asked Myron to come over. He went. They had sex. The result — though Myron wouldn’t know this until some fourteen years later — was a son, Jeremy, who Greg unwittingly raised as his own.
Yep, a mess.
Myron had always blamed Emily. Just as he had started to move on from the pain of losing her, she had been the one to call him that night. She had provided and encouraged the alcohol and made the first move. She had a plan of sorts, destructive as all get-out, and he was just a pawn in it. That was what he’d spent years telling himself. But now, with more distance and objective hindsight, Myron realized that his thinking was old-fashioned. He’d wanted to paint himself the good guy and ultimately the victim. Classic self-rationalization.
Man can justify anything if he puts his mind to it.
“Myron?”
It was Emily. Present-Day Emily. Boy, Win had warned him about letting old trauma back into his life, hadn’t he?
“So you two divorced,” Myron said, pushing away the past. “But then years later, you got back together, right? You even got remarried.”
Emily didn’t reply.
“And then, what, Greg just up and ran overseas without explanation?”
“There’s more to it.”
“I’m all ears, Emily.”
She did the lip gnaw again. “I didn’t tell the police this. Just so we are clear. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. It’s not their business. None of this is.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not your business either.”
“Okay.”
“Greg and I had an arrangement.”
Myron waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he asked, “What kind of arrangement?”
“A transactional one.”
Most arrangements are, Myron knew, but instead of raising that, he went again with: “Okay.”
“Greg was rich.”
“Right.”
“You know this better than anyone.”
“Okay.”
“Stop saying okay,” she snapped. “Anyway, he promised to take care of me.”
“Financially?” Myron asked.
“Yes. It’s how I can afford to live here. Greg set up a generous trust for me. For Jeremy too, of course. Win helped him set all that up.”
“Seems normal,” Myron said.
“It wasn’t. I mean, our relationship...” Emily stopped.
“Are you saying you weren’t really married?”
“Yes. Well, no. We were legally married. But I mean, what is marriage anyway? Greg spent his life on the road with basketball. That’s always been the case. During the off-season, he mostly hung out in South Beach. He only stayed with me when he visited New York, which was, I don’t know, maybe a month, six weeks every year.”
“And when he did stay, did you two—”
Myron motioned coming together with his hands, accordion style, wondering why he would ask a question like this in the first place. Did it matter?
“We had separate bedrooms,” Emily said, “though we sometimes hooked up. You know how it is. We’d go to a fancy dinner party or charity ball. We’re all dressed up, we’d have a bit to drink, we’d come home, we’d remember what it used to be like and it’s late and it’s too hard to find someone else...”
She met Myron’s eye. Myron said, “Got it. Go on.”
“What else is there?”
“For one thing, why did you want this arrangement?”
“I wanted financial stability.”
“And what about Greg?”
Emily turned away from him and headed toward a glass bar cart. “Drink?”
“No, thank you.” They were getting to the heart of it now. “Whose idea was this arrangement?”
“Greg’s,” she said, reaching for a glass with one hand and a bottle of Asbury Park gin. “This part is a little harder to explain.”
“Take your time.”
“I’m also not sure it’s relevant.”
“Your ‘dead’ husband is being accused of double murder,” Myron said. “It’s relevant. Why the arrangement, Emily?”