And I did not go home.

Chapter 2 — The Red Gown

Lavinia Merrow stood at my husband’s side in a fitted red gown, one hand resting on his arm as though she had a right to it.

As Bellweather’s communications director, she had spent months appearing beside Lucan at conferences, at dinners, at the “emergency strategy retreats” that seemed to require no one else’s attendance.

Tonight she was wearing a pair of diamond earrings I had last seen in my own jewelry box, before they went missing.

The earrings were the detail that told me she wanted to be caught, or at least that she had stopped being careful, which in a person like Lavinia amounts to the same thing.