Jaime Berger—Greg

Jaime Berger—Greg is defined by a quiet marital collapse whose apparent causes—overwork, emotional estrangement, post-traumatic distress, and Greg’s wish to relocate—gradually acquire the darker outline of interference. The relationship’s decisive consequence is not only divorce but Berger’s altered position in the story: separated from her husband, isolated in an empty office near Ground Zero, and forced to reconsider whether the end of her marriage was ever entirely her own affair.

Marriage Behind Professional Duty

Berger had spent years treating important cases as sufficient reason to remain in New York while Greg traveled with his two children from a previous marriage. The pattern made absence seem ordinary. Greg eventually decided that London suited him best and bought an apartment there, but the move also concealed a more direct rupture: he had a long-standing affair with a young English lawyer whom he had met while she was working at Berger’s office during a nerve-racking trial. Berger had not suspected anything when Greg and the lawyer went out to dinner while Berger continued working late into the night.

The marriage therefore deteriorated in an environment where professional obligation repeatedly displaced domestic attention. Greg’s later departure was not presented as the sudden beginning of a new life, but as the culmination of an arrangement in which his travel, Berger’s work, and the couple’s emotional distance had become mutually reinforcing. What Berger failed to recognize was not simply an isolated infidelity; it was the condition of the marriage itself.

The Divorce at Forlini’s

Berger became conscious of the marriage’s true condition only when Greg arrived at her office without warning one winter day and invited her to lunch. At Forlini’s, a restaurant favored by prominent criminal lawyers and politicians, the spouses sat opposite each other in a dining alcove surrounded by dark wood and large oil paintings of the English countryside. Greg did not disclose that he had maintained another relationship for years. Instead, he said that he wanted a divorce.

The setting sharpened Berger’s private comparison between Greg’s conduct and Kay Scarpetta’s imagined response. The alcoves were named for important guests, and the one where Berger and Greg sat bore the name of Nicholas Scoppetta. Seeing that name, Berger thought Scarpetta would have risen immediately from the offending pink leather banquette and walked out rather than allow her husband to lie to and humiliate her. Berger did not do that. She remained still and listened with the calm control characteristic of her own behavior.

Greg explained the divorce by saying that he no longer loved her. He attributed that condition to the period since the September 11 attacks, probably because of post-traumatic stress disorder, although he had not been at home during the attacks. He claimed that repeated news coverage had affected him almost as severely as people who had witnessed the destruction directly. His account joined private feeling to public catastrophe, converting the marriage’s failure into a psychological and historical aftermath.

Greg also described what had happened to the United States, and what was still happening to it, as unbearably traumatic, citing especially his real-estate investments and the sharply declining dollar. He intended to move to London and wanted a discreet divorce. The less Berger resisted, he said, the better it would be for everyone. Berger tested whether he could be honest about the immediate circumstances by asking whether another woman was involved. Greg dismissed the question as irrelevant if two people no longer loved each other. He then accused Berger, with little subtlety, of having other interests, making clear that he did not mean her work. Berger neither denied nor corrected him, and did not remind him that she had never broken her marriage vows, even though she may at times have considered doing so.

Discretion, Isolation, and Aftermath

The result was a divorce conducted according to Greg’s demand for privacy. Berger was now discreetly divorced, discreetly wealthy, and discreetly lonely. The repetition of “discreetly” describes more than the legal arrangement: it marks the emotional shape of the separation, in which wealth and composure conceal rather than repair abandonment. Greg was on the other side of the Atlantic, his children were adults, and the couple had no children together.

That loneliness became physically visible on New Year’s Day in the cold stone Art Deco building not far from Ground Zero. The office was empty because everyone else was either free or ill, depending on the enthusiasm with which the new year had been welcomed. Berger had no reason to go home and plenty of work, so she remained alone in the building. There was not even anyone else to answer the telephone. The marriage’s aftermath thus places her in a professional space that is both refuge and enclosure: work gives her somewhere to remain, but it cannot restore the domestic life that has disappeared.

The proximity to Ground Zero also binds her private history to the catastrophe Greg had used to explain his emotional withdrawal. Berger had watched the attacks from an office window, seeing the first American Airlines plane fly unusually low and loudly through a clear blue sky into the World Trade Center’s north tower, followed eighteen minutes later by the second plane striking the south tower. She had watched symbols of power burn and collapse, followed by ash and debris over southern Manhattan. The memory supplies a concrete context for the trauma language surrounding the divorce, while also exposing the gap between Berger’s direct experience and Greg’s claim to have suffered almost as intensely through television repetitions.

Morales and the Reinterpretation of the Marriage

The relationship acquires a new meaning when Berger later connects its breakdown to Mike Morales. She recalls that Morales was transferred to the detective division about a year earlier, around the time her marriage failed and shortly before Greg moved to London. Berger becomes certain that Morales encouraged Greg to leave and considers the possibility that the separation may even have been Morales’s idea.

This suspicion is grounded in Berger’s retrospective recognition of Morales’s characteristic method. She believes he could persuade a woman to betray her partner, allow the victim to cry on his shoulder, and then help repair the relationship—or cultivate the deceived man, enjoying friendship with someone unaware of how badly he had been betrayed. Morales’s behavior appears as a sequence of sadistic games rather than a single intervention. Greg and Morales had often sat downstairs drinking expensive whisky and talking, probably about Berger and often unkindly.

Berger does not claim that Morales simply wanted to replace Greg as her partner. She understands his pleasure as more elaborate: he would have enjoyed ending one relationship and beginning another, controlling both the damage and the supposed rescue. That interpretation transforms the divorce from a contained private settlement into a possible act within Morales’s broader pattern of emotional manipulation. Berger’s restraint at Forlini’s, once readable as composure in the face of humiliation, becomes more complicated in retrospect: she may have been responding to a marriage whose surrounding motives she had not yet learned to see.