“Malloy?” she asked in astonishment.

“Oh, well done!” he teased. “Anyone would think you had no idea how he feels about you.”

Sarah had no intention of discussing Malloy’s feelings for her. “I’m happy with the life I’ve chosen, Richard, even though I am lonely sometimes. But you don’t seem happy at all, which is why I don’t understand why you haven’t found someone else.”

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he tried, but she wasn’t fooled. She could hear the wistfulness in his voice.

“Your wife would want you to be happy, Richard.”

“Is that what you tell yourself, Sarah? Do you really think your husband would want you to be with another man?”

She almost said it was different for men, but she caught herself. She had no idea if it was or not. “I never knew your wife. What was she like?” she asked instead.

“Was she jealous, do you mean?”

“I’m not sure what I mean,” Sarah confessed. “You were obviously devoted to her, so you must have loved her very much.”

“Is that what you think? That I was devoted to her?”

She couldn’t quite read the expression in his voice. “You still miss her,” she reasoned. “And you haven’t been able to find anyone who could take her place in your life.”

“So you assume I’m still grieving for her.”

“Aren’t you?” she asked, although she was no longer certain she wanted to know the answer.

“Grief isn’t the only emotion that keeps people in mourning.”

Something Sarah knew only too well. She thought of her parents, who still mourned the death of her sister Maggie, although they rarely spoke her name. Their guilt would never allow them to forgive themselves enough to truly let her go. “You can’t think you were responsible for your wife’s death,” she said. “She died of a fever, and even the doctors couldn’t do anything for her. You told me that yourself.”

The glow from a passing streetlight briefly illuminated his face, and Sarah saw the kind of pain felt only by those suffering the torment of the damned. He must have seen her reaction, because he turned away quickly.