It was not enough, in the end, to erase her.

My wife had made sure of that herself.

Chapter 13 — What Actually Happened That Night

The recorder and the recovered messages let the investigators reconstruct the night hour by hour, and I am going to set down what happened, plainly, because Odile spent her last strength making sure it could not stay hidden, and the least I can do is not hide it now.

My brother came up the stairs drunk, late, with a duplicate key and a kit for picking locks, meaning to get into my office safe and take the ledger and the keycard for Calderon and clear his own debt in the bargain.

He tried Odile’s door first, to get her phone, to destroy her copies of his messages.

The interior chain held.

So he forced the frame, tearing the screws out of the wall.

Bryn was awake in that room.

Odile put herself between our daughter and my brother, and she told him — even then, even in that — that he could still stop, still hand the keycard back, still turn Calderon in and save himself.