If he was looking for comfort, he was searching in the wrong place. I didn’t answer. I was too busy seething. I know Deirdre is difficult. Caro had always played the role of the good daughter, while I’d been cast as the bad one. Yet there she was, writing that she’d felt the same way I had as a child. We should’ve been each other’s allies. Instead, we’d been estranged for years. Maybe I was the difficult one, but I wasn’t the dishonest one.

“What do you think she meant about resentment?” he added. “I thought we were close. I always told her she could tell me if she needed help.”

That was the last straw.

“Help, from you? You are literally the last person in the world anyone would turn to for help.”

“Deirdre . . .”

“She wanted you to know you were a shitty father who screwed up your kids. Caro played nice and made the best of it, but underneath it all, guess what?” My voice had gotten louder with each breath. I was shouting now. “She hated you as much as I do.”

I stormed out of the room and slammed the front door behind me. What Caro had written in her letter was true—she had always avoided any confrontation. I thrived on it. But at that moment, I had to get away from him. I’d hoped to get a clue about what was going on with the Thraxtons. Instead, I’d seen Caro’s unvarnished truths about our family. Nothing could have prepared me for that.

CHAPTER 30

THEO

“What are you doing?” I asked, staring down the barrel of the handgun. I wasn’t afraid so much as bewildered. I had hunted Mehmet Badem down to answer questions about the night Mirelle died, only to learn he’d rather shoot me than talk.

Badem stared at me, his hand quivering slightly. “I know all about you,” he said. “I never went to the police. I never talked. Why would you come here? I will not let you kill me.”

“All I want are answers,” I said, trying to sound confident and blasé, as if a gun weren’t pointed at my chest. “About the night Mirelle Beaulieu died.”

“I didn’t kill her,” he said. “I swear to you I didn’t.”

His words hit me like a tidal wave. I was there to ask him what he’d witnessed; it had never occurred to me that he might be Mirelle’s killer.

“I’m not accusing you of that,” I said. “But I remember your face. I saw you the night Mirelle died. You . . . I think you carried me. You put me on a plane. My sister, Juliet, was there.”

He nodded. “I remember her. She was angry. She said, ‘Drop him.’ She wanted me to throw you on the floor of the plane, I think. I put you in a seat and buckled you up.”

“It sounds like I should be thanking you. Please put the gun down. I’m not here to hurt you. All I want are answers.”

Badem stared into my eyes for what felt like a month before lowering his gun. He rolled up the lower half of his shirt, revealing a thin torso with two bullet holes in it. They were old and healed, but the flesh around them had settled in jagged mounds, like miniature volcanoes.

“That’s what happened the last time I took an assignment from Harris,” he said.

It jolted me, hearing the name of my father’s trusted lieutenant. My father had grown the business with shady side ventures, and Harris and Klaus were his partners in those crimes. “I would’ve jumped off a cliff rather than work with Harris on anything.”

“I should have done that,” Badem said, lowering his shirt. “But for several years, it was a very good living.”

“I don’t remember the night Mirelle died, and I’m trying to piece it together. I need you to tell me what you remember. Please, will you do that?” There was desperation in my voice, and I believe he heard it.

Badem gestured with the gun for me to sit on the sofa. I took the cushion Snoopy had vacated. Badem went into the kitchenette and rattled around, out of sight for a minute. When he returned, it was without the weapon. Instead, he brandished two glasses and a bottle filled with a clear liquid. He returned to the kitchenette and came back with a bottle of water.

“You have raki before?” he asked me.

“In Istanbul once,” I answered. “That was enough.”

He chuckled lightly. “It’s not poison; it just tastes like it.” He poured some liqueur into each glass and chased it with water. Instantly, the liquid became cloudy. He took a drink and made a face. “You too,” he said, and I followed suit. It was bitter and bracing.

“Tell me what you remember,” I prompted.

“I had been working at the hotel for six, seven years then. It was a good job, the best job I ever had in this country,” he said. “One afternoon, Harris came in. He said he needed me to be on call that night.”

“Hold on, Harris was in Berlin? We’re talking about twelve years ago. January thirtieth.”

“Yes, it was Harris. Most of the special assignments I did were for Klaus von Strohm. But the particularly dangerous ones were managed by Harris.”

I stared into the pale clouds swirling in my glass. Harris was almost always by my father’s side. When I’d called my father, he’d been traveling. Only . . . I didn’t actually remember calling my father; I’d been told I called him. What the hell had brought Harris to Berlin?

“Did Harris tell you what you would be doing?”

“No. He said it would be a late night, but it wouldn’t be dangerous.” He took another swig. “I got his call at three in the morning. I lived in Charlottenburg then; it wasn’t a long drive, maybe ten minutes. He picked me up, and we drove to the edge of Mitte, near the zoo. Harris told me to wait for him. I remember it was a freezing night, and he turned the engine off. It was so cold, and he was gone for fifteen minutes.”

He was staring into his glass as if a vision of that night were playing out in it.

I was trying to process the details he’d laid out. It chilled me that Harris had been there; I didn’t remember that at all. It made sense that my father would send him to clean up the scene—Harris’s military background and total lack of ethics would’ve been assets in that—but I couldn’t understand why he’d told Badem to be ready earlier in the day. It was as if he’d known something terrible was going to happen.

Or, perhaps, he was going to make something terrible happen.

“And after you waited outside?” I asked.

“Harris came back and ordered me to come in. He said I had to keep quiet, not say a word. We went to an apartment on the first floor. You were there, lying on the floor. There was a beautiful girl lying next to you.” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his palms. “She was dead. There was a knife in her chest. Blood was still pouring out of her body. It was getting on you.”

“But the knife . . .” My throat constricted; it was almost impossible to choke the words out. “The knife was in my hand.”

“Because Harris put it there,” Badem said. “You were out cold. After he moved the knife, Harris told me to wake you up. I tried shaking you. Harris told me to stop being so delicate and slapped you a couple of times. It was impossible to wake you up. I told Harris I couldn’t, and he said we had to. He said it was the whole point—you had to see this.”

A vicious thought had been coiling around my brain as soon as Badem mentioned Harris. I wanted to throw up. I’d spent more than a decade with the awful certainty that I was a killer, only to find out that I had been set up. If Mehmet Badem could be believed, Harris had murdered Mirelle while I was dead to the world.

“You finally came around, and you were very confused. You stared at the dead girl for a long time, like you couldn’t focus. Then you screamed ‘Mirelle!’ over and over. You were crying. You tried to get up, but Harris was holding your head down. I was holding your body in place.”

I remembered seeing Mirelle’s dead body and screaming. I’d had no sense of time, or how I’d stabbed her. I’d never understood why I’d attacked her in the first place—the voices in my head quieted when violence was done to me, not when I committed it. What I’d struggled to understand was how I’d blacked out from blood loss, yet had enough strength to attack and kill Mirelle. For the first time, the fog in my head lifted.

“I didn’t call my father, asking for help, did I?”

“You didn’t call anyone. Harris hit you, and you went out cold.”

Everything I’d thought I knew about that night was a lie.

“We drove east to a small airstrip. There was a private plane waiting for you. Your sister was already on board. Like I told you, she was furious.” Badem gave me a sorrowful look. “I remember feeling worried about you. I didn’t understand what had happened, but I pitied you.”

CHAPTER 31

DEIRDRE