I lay awake for a long time that night, staring at the ceiling in the dark and listening to the rumbling of my landlord’s washing machine. Saira prowled around the house at night, sometimes vacuuming or mopping or scrubbing the walls until two or three in the morning. Wilson, the tenant in the room next to mine, was half my size but snored like a foghorn, and I caught every blast through the paper-thin drywall. Finally, I gave up pretending to sleep and reached for my computer.

There were two messages I needed to send. The first was to the mysterious X, and I typed the email address Todd had given me into a new message. Hi, I’m Deirdre Crawley, I wrote. I’m Caroline Thraxton’s sister. I know she sent you a message to read after she died, and I want to talk to you about it. Can you message me back? Or call? Thanks. I added my phone number and pressed send.

One down. The next one would be harder to write.

I turned on the light and reached for the photos my sister had given me. Flipping through them, I found the one of Caro and the man I didn’t know. With Ben, at the Clarkson/Northcutt house in High Falls, New York. I studied his face. He was handsome in a bland way—clean-cut hair, well-tanned white skin, chiseled features, perfect teeth—and I found myself squinting at his image, trying to picture him in black shades like the man who’d been watching Caro’s funeral from afar at Green-Wood. It could’ve been him, but that was just a guess.

There was a lot about Ben Northcutt online. He was the definition of Intrepid Reporter, having been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He’d written three books on politics, drugs, and terrorism in South America, focusing on the years he spent living in Colombia and Argentina. His website linked to articles he wrote for Esquire and GQ and the New York Times and the Guardian, and I devoured one after another. There were plenty about political corruption and the drug trade, but the ones that stayed with me were haunting, especially a series about human trafficking for slave labor in the mines of Venezuela and Colombia. Others were about the rehabilitation of child soldiers who still struggled with PTSD, gangs in Bogotá who used zombifying drugs on their victims, and the excavation of a World War II–era Nazi hideout in the middle of Argentina.

The bottom line was that Ben seemed like a badass. Even his author photo—unsmiling and serious, next to a pile of human skulls—was kind of thrilling. I took a deep breath and tapped out the world’s dullest email—Hey Ben, this is Deirdre, Caroline Crawley’s sister, I really need to talk to you—and gave him my phone number. There was nothing I could do but wait.

It was tempting to read more of Ben’s work, but I remembered I meant to look up Caro’s. When she’d graduated from SUNY’s journalism school in New Paltz, we weren’t speaking—I was seventeen then and living with Reagan and her mom—but I’d kept track of Caro online, reading some of her articles for women’s magazines and travel sites and mocking them. It had been another two years before we’d spoken to each other, and right around that time she’d published a profile of Theo Thraxton in a glossy magazine I couldn’t recall the name of. It came up quickly online. The title was “Thraxton Heir or Modern-Day Indiana Jones?,” which was objectively terrible by any measure. It was part of a “30 under 30” article, and it was short. But I remembered it was filled with curious nuggets that didn’t usually turn up in puff pieces. I clicked on it and found a photo of Theo in a full-body neoprene wet suit, standing next to a broken stone head with seaweed on it. I started reading.

The Thraxton name is synonymous with luxury. With a hotel empire that operates in 38 countries, you would imagine that Theodore R. Thraxton Junior—or Theo, as he prefers to be called—has his hands full as the company’s vice president and CEO of global operations. But Thraxton, 27, has an unusual side hustle, repatriating stolen antiquities to their home countries.

“The truth is, I never wanted to be in the hotel business,” Thraxton admits. “That was my father’s dream for me, and I failed on my first try when I was studying in Berlin.” But Thraxton went on to enroll in Harvard’s ambitious MBA/JD program, where he graduated near the top of his class.

“My intent wasn’t to practice law,” Thraxton says. “But I grew up seeing how people manipulate the law to get what they want. It’s not a level playing field. I wanted to understand how to navigate the system.” His first success happened last year, when he helped the Thai government recover several pieces of Ban Chiang pottery—believed to be at least 2,000 years old—from an American museum that would prefer not to be named.

“Museums tend to be careful about the provenance of pieces today, but that wasn’t always true,” Thraxton says. “It’s part of the legacy of colonialism, holding on to other people’s heritage.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Thraxton is such a high achiever at a young age—his mother, Penelope Archer, a legend of the London stage, won her first Laurence Olivier Award when she was eighteen for her starring role in Romeo and Juliet, and his father, Theodore Senior, famously bought his first luxury hotel with cash he won at a roulette table in Monte Carlo. “I come from a dramatic family,” Theo admits. Asked about his own drama, he demurs. “The most dramatic episode of my life was when I was three years old and fell into the tiger enclosure at the Berlin Zoo,” he says. “I’m lucky to be alive, even with all the scars. Drama, I can do without. I’d just like to do some good in the world.”

I read the piece over twice. Other articles mentioned Theo, but they were boring business stories about Thraxton International’s global expansion. More recently, pieces quoted him on issues like the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. None of it was personal. I found a New York Times “Vows” column about Caro and Theo’s wedding, but I couldn’t bring myself to click on it just then. There were a couple of tabloid photos of the two of them together at charity balls, and then several of Caro splendidly dressed, but always alone. “Socialite Caroline Thraxton Chairs First Annual Gala for Domestic Violence Charity” popped up, and I noticed the byline belonged to Abby Morel, the reporter who’d tackled me at the church. I scanned it, but it was mostly pictures of rich people in fancy clothes. The charity in question was the Diotima Civic Society. It had come up the last time I’d argued with Caro—maybe a year ago—about how she’d become a corporate drone.

You always wanted to be a journalist, I’d said. So why are you stuck doing publicity for a hotel chain?

I was a journalist for a while, and it was terrible, Caro had answered. I got to write puff pieces under my own byline, or work like hell for someone else’s byline and let them take credit. In both cases, I worked for peanuts.

But journalism was your dream.

It was, but a lot’s changed since then. Caro didn’t make a direct reference to the years we’d lost touch, but that floated between us uneasily. I’m doing more good now than I ever did as a journalist. Diotima wouldn’t be able to do their amazing work without funding.

That’s great for now, I’d snarked, but the hotel chain probably won’t survive the pandemic.

Caro had smiled at that. You’d be surprised how well it’s doing.

I closed my laptop and turned off the light. My heart squeezed so tight remembering my sister that it physically ached. I’d been roughed up in and out of the dojo plenty of times, but no other pain ever hurt that much.

CHAPTER 10

THEO

My sister-in-law’s words haunted me at the gravesite. Caro’s dead. Your first wife is dead. Isn’t that what police call a pattern? It had come out of the blue, her rage so sudden and swift that I couldn’t even process it.

She had caught me off guard. I wouldn’t allow that to happen again.

But her words followed me for the rest of the day. Even in my bedroom that evening, they echoed in my mind. I found myself staring at the framed photographs that covered one wall. There was one in particular I couldn’t take my eyes off: Caroline and me together on a boat. In the background was the sparkling deep sapphire of the Mediterranean and a cloudless azure sky. Caroline wore a mint-green bathing suit with a matching cover-up, disguising any hint of her pregnancy. I was barefoot but encased in a blue neoprene wet suit. We were both grinning, drunk on the blissful freedom of our honeymoon. Everything was perfect for a time.

Then it all changed.