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happened six years ago, a month before she and Bryan were to be married, when he was expressing doubts about going through with the wedding.
    So she was angry, and we were out commiserating, since I had recently had a breakup of my own. Not that my breakups were exactly news events; you could set your clock by them.
    But what happened between Julie and me wasn’t revenge sex or even rebound sex. I wish it were, since that would have been the end of it. I was in love with Julie, I was before it happened, and I have been ever since. I also believed that she was in love with me.
    We never talked about it again after that night, and until this phone call I thought we never would. But I learned a lesson; if you’re going to fall in love with someone, your sister-in-law is not a terrific idea. Unfortunately, I was never able to put that lesson to any good use, since Julie is my only sister-in-law. And it was too late to stop loving her.
    “It’s OK, Julie. We’ll deal with it. I’m sure I’ll be hearing from him soon.”
    “Please tell him to come home, Luke.”
    “I’ve got a hunch that right about now advice from me isn’t going to carry the day.”
    “Will you let me know if he calls you?” she asked.
    “Of course.” Then, “Julie, why did you tell him?” She had to know it would be devastating and hurtful to him, which made it uncharacteristic for her to have said it. She was also breaking a promise to me in the process, which represented another surprise.
    “You know why, Luke.”
    The truth was that I did not have the slightest idea why. For some reason, women are always crediting me with being way more intuitive about them than I actually am. It’s the worst of both worlds; I’ve never had a clue what they are thinking, but because they believe I do, they’re less inclined to spell it out for me.
    But whatever the reason, the way she said, “You know why,” made me less eager to press the issue. I was now at the place I had no desire to be, directly in the middle of their marriage. When Bryan started screaming at me, I wanted to have as little information as possible, sort of like a POW undergoing interrogation. I wanted to be on a “need to know” basis, and I didn’t need to know any of this.
    Julie and I once again agreed to contact each other if either of us heard from Bryan, and no longer able to sleep, I got dressed and headed for the office.
    The media furor had not quite died down yet, as reporters were focused on delving into Steven Gallagher’s background. His life was both short and difficult, though no one seemed to have any idea that he had violent tendencies.
    Those who knew him professed shock that he could have committed a murder, but that has become standard stuff these days. For every serial killer there seems to be a dozen neighbors who swear he seemed like a quiet, nice guy, the last person you’d expect to have chopped up all those people.
    Media requests for interviews were still coming in, but I declined all of them. I had “been there, done that” and I didn’t want to spend the whole day refusing to answer the questions I had refused to answer the day before. Besides, it had taken me twenty minutes to remove the makeup; from now on I was going strictly “au naturel.”
    I had plenty else to do. I had a bunch of recent homicides to occupy my attention, and it’s not like the citizens of New Jersey were going to stop killing other citizens of New Jersey any time soon.
    So I tried as best I could to make the day “business as usual,” but in the back of my mind was Julie’s phone call, and the fact that I hadn’t heard from Bryan. His silence brought home very powerfully how hurt he must have been by what he saw as our betrayal. And the truth is that he was right, “betrayal” was the correct word for it.
    Bryan was not exactly the type to shy away from verbal confrontations; he believed everything should always be out in the open and discussed to death. It was one