What my voice held instead was something colder and far more final: absolute, settled certainty.

“You told me to figure it out myself, Julian,” I said quietly.

“You left me a note.

Three words.

Figure it out yourself.” I let it sit between us.

“So I did.”

Then I turned my head, and I looked at Evelyn, whose hands were shaking so violently now that she dropped her sunglasses onto the carpet and did not bend to retrieve them.

And I spoke to her, in the same quiet, certain voice, the voice of a woman answering a question that had been put to her in cruelty on a scrap of hotel stationery six thousand miles away.