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COURT ADJOURNED BEFORE KATHERINE Welsh could even begin her cross-examination of Sonny Blum, because Blum had suddenly clutched his chest and fallen forward out of his chair and started yelling, in a choked voice, that he was having a heart attack.

Playing a confused old man while I was questioning hadn’t done the job for him, so then he dialed it up, rather convincingly, I thought, even though I would have bet all the money Rob Jacobson was paying me that he was faking the whole thing like a champion.

But a doctor was summoned and Blum was wheeled out of the room and into the waiting ambulance and taken to NYU Langone Hospital–Long Island. Judge Michael Horton said we would resume in the morning. If Mr. Blum was still hospitalized, Horton said, I could call the next witness on my list.

There was no reason to tell Judge Michael Horton this, but I was happy—thrilled, really—to get out of there, mostly because I was starting to feel almost as sick as Sonny Blum had wanted us to think he was when he went into his flop.

I don’t tell anybody on my team how lousy I’m feeling. Just the usual and relentless and oppressive bullshit. My next appointment with my oncologist isn’t scheduled until the trial is over, which I’ve told Dr. Gellis could be as soon as a couple of weeks.

Maybe less.

I keep telling Jimmy Cunniff, even on my bad days, that we’re too close to the end now, that I’m going to see this through even if it kills me.

Every time I do, he replies the same way: “There has to be a better way of you saying that.”

He said it to me again today, right before we walked into the courtroom, and I suddenly turned around and kissed him.

“How many times do I have to tell you not to be gross,” Jimmy said.

When I’m finally home, I tell myself I’m not dying tonight, even though I feel as if I might be. Usually I manage to walk Rip, even if it’s just a short one around the neighborhood, when I get back from court. Occasionally, I wait to do it until I’ve had dinner.

But there is no dinner for me tonight, even though the nausea has finally dissipated.

Ben calls around seven and asks how I’m doing.

“Lousy,” I say, telling the truth for a change.

“You want me to come over and look in on the patient?”

I tell him that’s sweet of him, but no.

“Are you feeling lousy enough that one of us should call Sam Wylie?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “For now, I’m going to take one glass of wine and call her in the morning.”

“Is wine a good idea?”

“Is it ever really a bad one?” I say, then tell him I love him, and that I will check in with him in the morning.

I only make it through half a glass of chardonnay before I go straight to bed. It is one of the rare occasions when I am asleep almost immediately, dreaming about being on a walk with Fiona Mills, not surrounded by the mountains near the Meier Clinic, but on the beach here …

I am awakened by the ping that says I have an incoming text message.

It’s been sent by an unknown number.

You were warned

The second message comes in about thirty seconds behind the first.

This one is a photograph.

A photograph that makes me stare with horror at the phone in my hand, the glow from the screen providing the only real, and eerie, light in my bedroom.

It is my ex-husband Martin, on his back, on what I’m certain is the floor of his restaurant kitchen, eyes wide open, a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead and what looks like another in the middle of his chest, blood everywhere, on his face and white shirt and the floor around his body.

I scream then.

Loud enough to get Rip barking his head off.

Just not loud enough in this case to wake the dead.