The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

and started the coffeemaker, aware that he was slowly surveying her kitchen, taking in the stainless steel Sub-Zero refrigerator, the Viking stove, and the black granite countertops. She had remodeled the kitchen soon after she’d bought the house, and she felt a sense of pride that he was standing in
her
territory, that she had earned everything he was now looking at, with her own hard work. In that regard, their divorce had been relatively simple; they had asked for nothing from each other. After only two years of marriage, they’d simply reclaimed their separate assets, and gone their own ways. This home was hers alone, and each evening, when she walked in the door, she knew that everything would be where she had left it. That every stick of furniture had been her purchase, her choice.
    “Looks like you finally got the kitchen of your dreams,” he said.
    “I’m happy with it.”
    “So tell me, do meals really taste better when they’re cooked on a fancy six-burner stove?”
    She didn’t appreciate his undertone of sarcasm, and she shot back: “As a matter of fact, they do. And they taste better on Richard Ginori china, too.”
    “What happened to good old Crate and Barrel?”
    “I’ve decided to indulge myself, Victor. I’ve stopped feeling guilty about having money and spending money. Life’s too short to keep living like a hippie.”
    “Oh come on, Maura. Is that what it felt like, living with me?”
    “You made me feel as if splurging on a few luxuries was a betrayal of the cause.”
    “What cause?”
    “For you, everything was a cause. There are people starving in Angola, so it’s a sin to buy nice linens. Or eat a steak. Or own a Mercedes.”
    “I thought you believed it, too.”
    “You know what, Victor? Idealism becomes exhausting. I’m not ashamed of having money, and I won’t feel guilty about spending it.”
    She poured his coffee, wondering if he was conscious of the ironic little detail that he, an addict of Mt. Sutro coffee beans, was drinking a brew made from beans shipped across the country (wasted jet fuel!) Or that the cup in which she served it was emblazoned with the logo of a pharmaceutical company (corporate bribery!) But he was silent as he took the cup. Strangely subdued, for a man who’d always been so driven by his idealism.
    It was that very passion that had first drawn her to him. They had met at a San Francisco conference on third world medicine. She had presented a paper on overseas autopsy rates; he had delivered the keynote address about the many human tragedies encountered by One Earth’s medical teams abroad. Standing before the smartly dressed audience, Victor had looked more like a tired and unshaven backpacker than a physician. He had, in fact, just stepped off the plane from Guatemala City, and had not even had the chance to iron his shirt. He’d walked into the room carrying only a box of slides. He’d brought no written speech, no notes, just that precious collection of images, which played across the screen in tragic progression. The young Ethiopian mother, dying of tetanus. The Peruvian baby with the cleft palate, abandoned at the roadside. The Kazakh girl, dead of pneumonia, wrapped in her burial shroud. Every one of them was a preventable death, he’d emphasized. These were the innocent victims of war and poverty and ignorance that his organization, One Earth, could have saved. But there would never be enough money, or enough volunteers, to meet the needs of every humanitarian crisis.
    Even halfway back in that dark room, Maura had been moved by his words, by how passionately he spoke of tent clinics and feeding stations, of the forgotten poor who died unnoticed every day.
    When the lights came up, she no longer saw just a rumpled doctor standing behind the podium. She saw a man whose sense of purpose made him larger than life. She, who insisted on order and reason in her own life, found herself attracted to this man of almost frightening intensity, whose job took him to the most chaotic places on earth.
    And what had he seen in her? Certainly not a sister crusader. Instead, she’d brought stability and calm to his life. She was the one who balanced their checkbook and organized the household, the one who waited at home while he traveled from crisis to crisis, continent to continent. His life was lived out of a suitcase, and was rich with adrenaline.
    Has that life been so much happier without me? she wondered. He did not look particularly