The Whole World by Emily Winslow Page B

me like he said he would. His name was Morris. I don’t know if that was his first or last name, but he said I should call him that. I’d lost his card.
    Morris told me that the cleaner for Earth Sciences said Nick’s office was a mess on Tuesday evening. Apparently he’d been sick. Did I know anything about this, since I’d been with him Tuesday?
    This was the worst thing he could have asked me. I didn’t lie immediately. I considered whether and how much to lie.
    “That was me. I had a bug. When he saw I wasn’t feeling well he brought me up to his office.”
    “Oh. All right.” Morris fiddled through his notes. “I understand his office is up several flights of stairs and near the end of a long corridor? How is it that he thought that would be a comfort to an ill friend?”
    “I don’t know, Morris, but that’s how it was.” There was something about calling him by his name that felt satisfyingly insubordinate, even though he had asked me to call him that.
    “Look, Miss Bailey, I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, but I do think you could shed some light on his state of mind. I really don’t see the motivation behind your brevity. If you’re not attached, and neither was he, there’s no one to protect….”
    Morris may have been a shrewd cop but he was a naïve person. There was myself to protect, of course. My sanity. Who else would be more important?
    “It’s all right to tell me,” he said. Then he waited. His not-going filled the room more and more until it pressed me near flat.
    I sucked in a breath. He cleared his throat. It took that little to crack me.
    He swore he didn’t know how it ended up in the news. He wouldn’t share his case notes with the press, he said. Nevertheless, there it was, all I’d told him, leaked by whatever usual gutters ran between the police and the paper. They described it more luridly than I had, but they did capture my vehemence that we were nothing to each other.
    It was reported in Monday evening’s edition. On Tuesday, everyone knew.
    I was grateful for the rain; it allowed me an umbrella to hide under. I didn’t want to look at anyone, even my friends. Liv would lord it over me. I was broken and she wasn’t.
    She was coming out of the big brick library as I headed in. I’d just pulled my umbrella down for the revolving door. We saw each other through the glass, spinning around the same axis. She went all the way around to end up back inside. “You bitch,” she hissed at me.
    I wished to be outside, anonymous in the rain. I wished to be upstairs among the books, where she wouldn’t be allowed to talk to me. I wished she would let go of my arm. My closed umbrella pressed against my leg and soaked my jeans through.
    People stared. The person behind the desk asked if there was a problem. Liv said in a raised voice that the problem was that I was ungrateful, which was baffling. Did she mean I’d been ungrateful to her for something? But it was Nick. She meant toward Nick. She called me an ungrateful bitch. We were asked to leave.
    I pushed through the revolving door as fast as I could. Liv squeezed herself into the next compartment and spilled out onto the front steps right after me. She chased me down them, out into the parking lot. A car pulled out right in front of me. I had to stop. Liv put her hand on my shoulder.
    “I’m sorry, okay?” she said. We were both breathing hard. We were both wet.
    Nick had been gone six days by this time. Speculation was drifting more toward death, either by murder or by accident. No one had suggested that he might have killed himself; no one could make his personality fit that. But, however it had happened, it didn’t look like he was coming back. I guess that’s a good reason to get hysterical. All of us were kind of hysterical, just set off by different things.
    Liv asked me to go with her to Kettle’s Yard. She held my arm, but loosely, squeezing it gently. I said okay.
    We went into a gallery full of