Torsten laughed under his breath.

“Loneliness does strange things to a woman.”

Ingrid lowered her eyes to the floor.

I filed all of it away — the pearls, the watch, the way my wife had gone quiet as a held breath — and I said nothing, because six months in places where panic gets people killed teaches you that the first thing to do with a wrong situation is watch it.

But I want to name what I was actually seeing in those first minutes, because it was all there, if I’d let myself read it.

The pearls my mother had never owned.