“I don’t even know. What happened?”

“Apparently, someone reported them anonymously for aiding in the abduction of a young woman. Turned out Leo’s cousin was just going on a road trip with her university buddies, and they decided to leave real late at night to avoid the traffic.”

“Well, if it was me, that probably looked very weird.”

Riki laughed, but it held a sharp edge. “What about Brett and Veda’s dog?”

“I don’t hurt animals.” It was all the answer I had, and it was the only answer I could accept.

Leaving Riki to destroy what I’d given him, I went to my father’s house to pack up my stuff. I found him sitting in his study, halfway to drunk, a photo of my mother on his desk. “Part of me kept hoping she’d crawl back.” Tears rolled down his face. “I loved her, that bitch. She’s still the most incredible woman I’ve ever known.”

I walked away without replying, shutting the door on the past.

EPILOGUE

FOUR MONTHS LATER

I sat on a large rock on a mountain in Udaipur, my mother’s ashes scattered to the winds. Beside me was the woman who’d become my friend, the two of us entwined by our broken pieces.

“Did you read the article this morning?” Lily asked from beside me. “About Calvin?”

“Yes.” All those years I’d known his family had died in a car accident—I’d never thought to check the details. Who would? After all, how many car accidents were caused by a suicidal father driving his family off a bridge and into a massive dam?

Calvin should’ve been in that car, but he’d been running late.

So he’d been left behind.

But Lily was interested in the lead point of the article. “Guess he never thought anyone would dig up his former lover. Or that the chemicals would still be in Dr. Mehr’s liver. Yay for accidental mummification.”

“Yes.” Part of me had noted the mummification thing for use in a future book, while the rest of me had felt only a sense of quiet satisfaction that a woman I’d never known had been given justice.

So had my mother.

It turned out the police had been sitting on two pieces of evidence they’d never revealed—the tip of a knife blade embedded in one of my mother’s ribs and, critically, foreign DNA found on a broken watch-strap once drenched in my mother’s blood.

I’d learned that under the right conditions, DNA could easily survive a decade. They’d found ancient DNA thousands of years old in caves, and my mother’s car had essentially become a cave. Despite the cracked windows, the position of the strap hidden under the seat meant the elements had never reached it.

It had lain, cool and protected, as the seasons changed and the years passed.

It was such an odd place to find it that I knew my mother had done it on purpose. In her last moments of life, she’d found the will to finger her murderer.

But it had meant nothing until the police had a suspect.

Calvin had never been on their radar.

“Constable Neri called me this morning,” I said to Lily. “While you were in the shower.”

We’d told my grandmother that we were going for a walk, would return soon. She wouldn’t worry if we took longer. She’d have forgotten us within minutes. The cruel disease that had taken her mind had given her this one gift—she was always happy to hear that her Nina was on the way to the village, that she’d arrive soon.

“What did she say?” Lily leaned forward, the short, sharp cut of her hair still a shock.

I’d thought it’d remind me of Paige, but it didn’t. They were two different women, each a unique presence.

“Calvin admitted everything a few hours ago, after Diana confronted him. He said he was protecting her. He hit on Sarah but she was horrified and planned to tell Diana.”

“Did he admit to murdering Dr. Mehr, too?”

“Yes. She’d asked her husband for a divorce because she thought Calvin intended to do the same with Diana.”

“Let me guess—when Calvin blew her off, she threatened to confront Diana. So . . . your mum. He found out that she knew about the affair with Dr. Mehr?”

“The worst of it is that my mother wasn’t going to tell Diana, but Calvin couldn’t take a risk on that.” My mother had confronted Calvin privately, had railed at him to be a better man, to be the man Diana deserved.

“It’s so controlling,” Lily muttered. “Killing to hold on to a woman you’re disrespecting the whole time. Because there had to be other affairs.”

I’d been thinking about that since I read the article. “Calvin lost everyone he loved as a boy. I don’t think he has the emotional capacity to bear even the slightest threat to his current family—it’s almost as if he’s trying to be the exact opposite of his father. Protecting where his father destroyed.”

“Sounds like a cop-out to me. He wanted to have his cake and eat it, too.”

I didn’t reply. Lily and I both knew that childhood pain dug deep craters into the soul, caused pathways to twist and mutate. For Calvin, it had morphed into a pathological need to create a perfect family no one was allowed to endanger.

To say Diana was devastated was a vast understatement. She’d put Calvin on a pedestal, all but worshipped him. But the one thing Calvin hadn’t understood until now was that Sarah had been more child and less sister to Diana. And what Diana loved even more than Calvin were her children. She would never forgive him for what he’d done.

I’d spoken to her more than once in the aftermath, and every single time, I saw the guilt that was eating her up from the inside, a corrosive acid.

“Sarah came to me once because she was uncomfortable with how Calvin was looking at her,” she’d told me as we sat in the clearing where my mother had died. “She said she thought he’d spied on her while she was showering. I’ll never forgive myself for how I reacted—I told her he was a good man and to never make such allegations.