Mistress

Chapter 38

I greet Anne Brennan at the door of my office and offer her a chair. She looks like she could use it. She looks tired and out of sorts-frazzled, as Diana used to say.

I don’t know Anne very well. I met her just a handful of times, but other than Randy she was the only person Diana ever talked about in terms of personal intimacy. So I feel like I know her through Diana.

Anne is cute, a petite woman with curly brown hair to her shoulders, attractive in a warm, nonthreatening way. Mary Ann to Diana’s Ginger. That would make me Gilligan.

“I’m not sure why I’m here,” she says. “I’m not sure where to go. Diana trusted you so much.”

“Tell me,” I say. I’m debating what I might tell her. She should go first.

“I mean, first it’s Diana, and now people are coming around, asking me all kinds of questions about her.”

“What people?” I ask.

“The CIA,” she says. “They want to know what I know about Diana. Why she would kill herself. Was she romantically involved with someone? Things like that.”

“What did you tell them?”

I admit, I’m hoping her answer will be, You, Ben. She was romantically involved with you.

“I-I didn’t-” She gets out of the chair and starts to pace. She’s been shaken up by the feds. They have a way of doing that. “I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to tell them, y’know? I wanted to keep her privacy. But it was like they knew I was holding back. And then they start threatening me. They say they’ve pulled all my tax returns for the last ten years and they’re sure they can find something wrong with them. ‘You can always find something,’ they said. They said I could lose my home and my catering business and-”

“Anne. Anne. It’s okay. It’ll be okay. I promise.”

She bursts into tears, her face in her hands. I put an arm around her shoulder and help her back into the chair. I fetch some water from the tiny fridge behind my desk and hand her the sweaty bottle.

She finally composes herself, taking a couple of sips and some deep breaths. “This is really embarrassing, coming unglued like that.”

“Nothing to be embarrassed about. They rattled you. It’s their specialty.” I squat down next to her. “Listen, Anne, they’re not going to do anything to you. They just wanted to make sure you didn’t hold back. Did you hold anything back?”

She doesn’t respond. A nonanswer that is, in fact, an answer.

“I didn’t tell them about…a friend of hers.”

“Jonathan Liu,” I say.

She looks at me. “Jonathan Liu they knew about.”

I recoil. “There was another friend?”

Her eyes part from mine. She inhales and exhales slowly.

“The Russian,” she says. “I didn’t tell them about the Russian.”