“I’m going to tell you what I know, and I want you to fill in the blanks,” I said. “I’ve always avoided thinking about Mirelle because of the horrific way her life ended. But once I started remembering—and looking at the facts in the cold, hard light of day—it all smacked of a setup. Mirelle just landed on my doorstep one day. That wasn’t an accident. What I want to know is, how deeply were you involved?”

He met my eyes. “We say we wish to know dark secrets, Theo, but we rarely mean it. The truth is often so ugly we can’t look it in the face.”

“I need to know what happened.”

“If you are certain, then. Your suspicion is correct, Theo: I hired her.”

“Hired? She was a prostitute?”

“She was an aspiring actress with a sideline as a dominatrix,” Klaus said. “You had a type. Your father was hysterical about the clubs you frequented. About all the drugs. I kept telling him you needed your freedom, that you’d come to your senses eventually. But your father insisted. That’s why I hired Nastya.”

“Who?”

“You knew her as Mirelle. She was a Russian girl. She was talented with languages, good with accents. You never imagined she wasn’t French, did you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“I knew she was what you needed just then,” Klaus said. “And it worked. You stopped going to those clubs. You used drugs, but not as much. Things were looking up. At least, I thought they were.”

“What happened?”

“Your father was angry. He was paying this girl a lot of money, plus footing the bill for her apartment. He didn’t want simply an improvement; he wanted . . . everything to be his way.” Klaus snapped his fingers. “He wanted you to be his creature. You understand?”

“Yes.” My father had always wanted a son who would show off his superiority to the world. I was an embarrassment.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Nastya took you on that little trip through Alsace for your twentieth birthday. Your father lost his mind when you told him you got married. He called me, ranting about this Schlampe trapping his son. I told him to calm down, that the marriage wasn’t even valid. But he took it like a shot across the bow. He thought Nastya—Mirelle—had her hooks in you too deep.”

“What about my sister? What was her role in all of this?”

“Juliet?” Klaus asked with surprise. “What role would she have? She was still a student then. If she knew of Mirelle, it was only what you or your father told her.”

“But Juliet was on the plane that took me to rehab . . .” As the words tumbled out of my mouth, I remembered what she’d said that night. You ruined my week in Paris, you stupid piece of shit. I wish you were dead. It dawned on me that nothing about the night Mirelle was killed was accidental. Juliet was in Europe because our father had flown her there. She had likely thought it a treat, a reward for her good grades. It was my father who’d had other plans.

“You’re telling me that my father had Mirelle killed,” I said quietly.

“To be clear, I am not your father’s confessor. He never made a direct admission of guilt to me.”

“But you know him. You put the story together.”

“He didn’t tell me what he was going to do. I would never have allowed it.” Klaus stared into his glass. “It wasn’t the first job Nastya did for me. I had to tell her parents she was dead. It was . . .” His voice trailed off. “Your father broke our relationship. I couldn’t trust him anymore. Say what you will about the Stasi; we had rules. Your father doesn’t.”

“My father didn’t just murder her. He framed me for it. He made me believe I was a killer.” The idea was new and raw in my mind. I’d always had an uneasy relationship with my father, but my main antagonist had always been Juliet. I had blamed her for every awful thing. In my mind, she had fangs and horns and a forked tongue. How many times had I complained to my father about how evil she was, only to have him agree with me? It was as if he wanted me to hate my sister.

“He wants to control you, Theo. Your father and I have very different ideas about life, but the main one is this: I know I am a criminal. Your father believes he is a businessman. I have always kept my children far from my work. Your father, on the other hand, wants you to follow in his footsteps.”

“He convinced my family that I was a killer. Juliet believes it. Ursula. Caroline.” My voice choked on my wife’s name. No wonder she’d wanted to divorce me. Now that I finally understood the depths my father had sunk to, my brain could barely process all the consequences. Mirelle’s death had changed me; I never wanted to hurt anyone again, to be in a state where I could lose control. But it had also damaged every important relationship I had. I couldn’t fully trust anyone, ever.

“My sister should know better, after the life she’s had with your father,” Klaus said. “But Ursula stopped speaking with me long before this happened.”

“She once told me you forced her to move into my father’s house.” My brain was still spiraling around the implications of what my father had done, but I wasn’t going to miss the chance to understand this piece of family history. Ursula had been in my life as long as I could remember, even before my mother had walked out.

“I suppose I did. Ursula was young and shiftless, and your mother . . . well, she was always a character, and she had a rough time after you were born. Ursula was supposed to help out with you and your sister,” Klaus said. “I never imagined she would have an affair with your father. I certainly never told her to marry him. That was her own mistake.”

“She was the reason my mother left,” I said. “Juliet despises her for that.”

“You don’t?”

“Should I? Ursula took care of me from the time I was young. My mother left and never came back. If anyone was at fault for the affair, it was my father.” It was true that I blamed him for it. But now there was so much more that I had to condemn him for.

“He was older, but that did not make him wiser.”

“My father had you hire Mirelle to pretend to be my girlfriend. Then he killed her and made me think I was a monster,” I said. “He deserves all the blame. For everything.”

Klaus drank some wine. “I know it is a horrible shock, but I want you to understand it from your father’s perspective. He has only one son, and this precious boy was bent on self-destruction. Can you imagine the grief that would cause? The heartbreak?”

“Don’t tell me that my father gaslights me because he loves me.”

“I don’t think your father knows what love is,” Klaus says. “It’s why he tries to control you.”

“He’s been holding Mirelle’s death over my head for years,” I said. “It’s how he got me to come work for him.”

“That only went so far,” Klaus pointed out. “You quit when you discovered he was laundering money through some of the hotels.”

“He’s using it right now to get custody of my son.” Technically, it was Juliet’s name on the documents, but as ambitious as my sister was, I understood now that my father’s fingerprints would be found on them. He had either put Juliet up to it, or was using her as a shield.

Klaus peered at me. “How? He can’t tell anyone what you did. Scratch the surface, and what he did will become clear.”

What Klaus said was true, but my mind was traveling in other directions. My father had known that I’d come back early from my trip to Bangkok. I’d scheduled it that way so I’d be able to see Dr. Haven with no questions asked by my family, but somehow my father knew I’d stopped by my house at five in the morning. His home was across the street, of course, so it wasn’t strange that he might glimpse something out the window. But now that I knew how demented he actually was, I wondered how far he’d gone in invading our privacy.

“Theo?” Klaus prompted. “You look a million miles away. What’s wrong?”

“Klaus, do you think there’s a chance that my father killed Caroline?”

“What? Why would he? He thought the sun rose and set with her. What reason would he have to do her harm?”

My mind went back to the last time I’d seen Caroline. At five in the morning, I’d unlocked the door to our house, creeping upstairs quietly. I’d needed to pick up a couple of things for my session with Dr. Haven, including the threadbare tiger my mother had bought for me at the Berlin Zoo. To my shock, Caroline had been up. Do you want to come up now, Ben? I can’t wait. We’re really doing this, aren’t we?

I’d frozen in place on the staircase, but she’d already heard me. She opened her door. There was fury in her eyes when she saw it was me. What are you doing here?

I live here, in case you’ve forgotten, I said.

I didn’t want to think about what happened next.

“Caroline was seeing someone,” I said.

“I don’t think your father would care,” Klaus said. “He cheated on his first wife with his second wife, then on his second wife with your mother, then . . .” He took a drink. “The only person I know who hated your wife is your sister.”

No matter what Klaus said, an idea was taking hold in my brain. Perhaps my father did care about Caroline; it didn’t matter—his affection was like poison. He was using her death to his advantage, and that suggested her death hadn’t been accidental at all.

CHAPTER 35