The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 7

London

2024

She shouldn’t have come here.

Margo glanced up and down the quiet street, once, twice. Tension filled her limbs; her legs frozen. The urge to bolt was overwhelming, even as her feet propelled her forward.

She should have called first. Should have scheduled a meeting properly, over the phone or through email. She should have done this officially, considering there was nothing personal left between them.

Margo glanced up at the orange-red brick building, the occasional ivory stone interspersed along the edges. Three stories of windows stared back at her.

The fourth story was a rooftop garden, not much larger than the space in front, but impressive considering the cost of real estate in this part of London. A black wrought iron railing traced the edges of the roof, the posts darting to the sky with arrow-like precision. She used to stand behind that railing and look out over London, watch the sun go down, and ask herself how she’d gotten so lucky that this was her life.

A light was on in the front window.

Margo walked up the path to the front door.

She moved to pull her key out from her purse as she had done many times before, only to stop and remember that this was no longer her home, that she no longer had a key, no longer belonged here.

She pressed the buzzer anyway.

Ten seconds passed.

Twenty.

Thirty.

Margo counted her breaths, trying to steady the nerves rising inside her.

Just when she’d decided to leave, just as she took a step back, the heavy, black-lacquered door swung open.

A beautiful blonde woman stood on the other side of the threshold, dressed in an oversize sweatshirt Margo was intimately familiar with, her mile-long legs encased in a pair of black leggings.

The woman’s eyes widened as she took in Margo’s appearance.

Margo could only imagine how she looked.

Music drifted from the flat, and she recognized one of the songs instantly, knew the playlist it came from, remembered evenings like this with a glass of wine in hand.

This blonde woman, whoever she was, had stepped into Margo’s life—or at the very least, Margo’s past.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come,” Margo blurted out, regretting the words as quickly as they left her mouth.

The sound of footsteps filled the hallway, and the woman turned, giving Margo the perfect excuse to escape, the opportunity to turn and head for the street, to leave Kensington and the past behind her.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she was frozen in time on the doorstep, helpless to do much of anything while she waited, waited—

He turned the corner from the kitchen, and his smile hit her first, slicing through her and cleaving her in two.

His gaze was on the woman, a concerned, “Sasha?” falling from his lips before his gaze cut to Margo.

If it hadn’t hurt so much, if it hadn’t been so horrible, she almost would have laughed at how comically awful his reaction was. Hysteria bubbled up inside her. She wished she could unwind the last few hours, go back to that moment when she’d gotten on the Tube earlier this evening, blissfully unaware of all the ways her night was about to careen off the tracks.

He took a step forward, stumbling slightly before righting himself. It was so uncharacteristic of him that for a moment it almost jarred Margo from her own panic. The Luke she knew seemingly never took a wrong step.

“I’m sorry—I—” Margo fumbled with the right words.

What was there to say except that she had spectacularly screwed up in coming here?

“I need to talk to you,” she finished, the truth tumbling out from her.

She could feel the weight of Luke’s stare as he took in her appearance and belatedly realized she should have cleaned herself up.

He closed the distance between them in a few quick strides. “Are you alright? You’re bleeding.”

Suddenly, he was there, right in front of her, and she could have reached out and pressed her palm to his chest, curling her fingers around the fabric like she used to do, bringing him close to her—

“It’s not mine—the blood, I mean. I must have accidentally touched my face after—”

The words broke as she realized that Mr. Thornton’s blood was on her, staining her skin. She was going to be sick.

“Luke, what’s going on?” Sasha interjected.

“I’m sorry.” He turned away from Margo. “Just give me a moment.”

“Who is this?” Sasha asked.

Luke took a deep breath as though preparing himself for something singularly unpleasant.

“My ex-wife.”

Margo stared at her reflection in the washroom mirror. The blood was gone now, Luke’s ivory washcloth mottled with red stains. His mother had bought the linens after they had married, the domesticity of such tasks never high on Margo’s radar, especially back then when she had been hustling with everything she had to get her business off the ground. Likely, Luke’s mother had been trying to help, but for Margo, their arrival was a perceived indictment on her domestic skills or lack thereof.

After all, wasn’t she supposed to be able to have it all? To run her business, to go to Pilates at least three times a week, manage her finances and the household, devote time to friendships, to family, to her marriage, of course, have time for leisure activities and hobbies that she could talk about with knowledge and enthusiasm at parties, find inner peace, and also have dinner waiting for Luke after they both got home from their exhausting days? It was possible, surely. Lots of articles that caused her to roll her eyes as she read and filled her with a nagging sense of failure when she’d finished told her so. Not to mention the social media accounts she’d followed hoping for some inspiration that had instead left her closing her phone screen wondering how the hell they managed to do it all and had her collapsing in front of a reality TV show instead.

She’d tried to be a good wife, she really had, but there was no blueprint for her to follow. Her pride, her sense of self, had come from her work, from building her business, from making sure she was independent and could take care of herself if she needed to. That had come naturally to her. The rest of it? Not so much.

Her parents had divorced when she was so young that she’d not had an example of what marriage was supposed to look like—at least in a healthy, functional way—and her mother’s remarriage in Margo’s twenties to a man who lived in Scottsdale had only put more distance between them. There wasn’t a natural closeness between them, the kind of relationship where she had a mother she could confide in, could look to for guidance. Luke’s mom, while well-meaning, had been too polished, too perfect, and the few times she’d even tried to be honest about her struggles, she could tell Lucille had been mildly—albeit politely—appalled.

Margo picked up the washcloth and tossed it in the wastebasket, the fine fabric ruined. She made a mental note to ask Bea to send Luke a replacement.

Margo opened the door and stepped into the hallway, the scent of whatever Luke and his—girlfriend?—were cooking wafting toward her. A chicken dish, maybe; French by the seasoning if she had to guess.

Low music filled the hallway, followed by the noise of pots and pans banging together, Sasha’s cooking taking on a furious note.

Had Luke told Sasha he was married before? She could only imagine what he would have said—that it was impulsive, that they burned out as quickly as they started.

No—she couldn’t envision Luke sharing so much.

Margo paused outside his study, taking a breath for courage.

She pushed open the door and traveled back in time.

The room was exactly as she remembered it except for the photographs that used to reside on his desk. Gone was the one of them in Paris, the one where her cheeks had hurt from the cold and from smiling so much. Their wedding photo had disappeared, too, and she couldn’t ignore her relief that a framed photo of Sasha hadn’t replaced them. It would happen one day, of course. The day she suggested they should divorce, she’d known he would eventually move on. She’d just always assumed his moving on would happen in the background of her life. Perhaps she would see him walking down the street or run into someone who had known them then who would casually mention that Luke had remarried, and Margo would smile and express her happiness for him, and it would mostly be true, and she would only be dying a little inside.

Kind of like how she felt right now.

Luke leaned against the corner of his desk, his legs crossed at the ankle, arms folded over his chest. One of his fingers was tapping restlessly against his forearm. Whenever he was nervous or impatient, he had a hard time sitting still, as though he was ready to attack whatever problem he faced head-on. His gaze scanned her appearance quickly, searching for any injuries, any signs of bleeding she had missed.

“What happened?” he asked Margo.

Margo took a deep breath. “Mr. Thornton is dead. He was killed in his shop. Stabbed. I found his body.”

Luke uncrossed his arms, pushing off from the desk. He stopped, just out of reach, and she could feel his hesitation, the instinct to offer comfort disappearing as quickly as it had arisen. Clearly, she wasn’t the only one who was stuck between the past and the present.

“When?”

“A couple hours ago. He was still alive when I found him,” Margo added, wondering if he was aligning the timeline in his mind, realizing that they had just missed each other at the bookshop—that he had just missed the killer.

“I’m sorry,” Luke replied. “I know how much you respected him. He was a good man. You could tell he really cared about the books he was selling, about making sure his customers had a good experience. He cared about you a great deal, too. Worried about you.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

Silence greeted her, and then that look, the one that she recognized from their time together. He was measuring his words, weighing what he would tell her. Deciding which parts of himself he was going to share and keep away from her.

Margo had met Luke during grad school. Eight years her senior, he’d been using his art degree as a stepping stone for his law enforcement career, where he specialized in art theft.

Luke’s job had always been off-limits. At the time, he was working in law enforcement, in art crime, often on cases for Interpol. He didn’t talk about what he did, didn’t bring his professional stresses home to her, didn’t discuss how difficult his day had been over dinner. That didn’t mean it didn’t affect them, though, that she hadn’t learned to read her husband’s moods, that she wasn’t aware when he was utterly consumed by a criminal he was trying to catch. Smuggling and stealing art was often tied into larger criminal enterprises, and Luke regularly saw the worst sides of humanity in the work he did. In their marriage, it had meant that there was always a wall between them. There was a side of Luke she knew well—the husband who would watch television with her late at night in bed, the husband who loved heading down to the pub on the weekend, the one who could make her dizzy with his kisses. But beyond that there was a stranger, a man who lived in a world of secrets and danger that left her fretting for his safety on the nights he didn’t come home.

It had been a long time since she had felt like she belonged with another person, as though she was part of something that encompassed herself. Her parents’ divorce when she was ten had left her feeling as though she existed in a state of limbo. She was a remnant of a past family they both had rejected, a holdover that didn’t quite fit in the new lives they carved for themselves. Maybe that was why she had fallen for Luke so quickly, so gratefully, even though she hadn’t been looking for it, even though she hadn’t known what to do with him, with a marriage, once she had it. She’d sort of figured she’d apply the same “fake it till you make it” approach to marriage that she’d clung to in business. She’d underestimated how complicated the emotional aspect would be.

A year into their marriage, Luke had asked her if she thought they should start trying for a baby, and she had burst into laughter at the ridiculousness of the notion. There was no way she was ready to add another thing onto her plate when she was already struggling to maintain the responsibilities she had.

He hadn’t found it as macabrely funny as she had, didn’t understand how she viewed herself as chasing a life that was just out of reach. His friends and peers were older than she was, had already established themselves in their careers and were now focusing on their families. She was playing catch-up. And when she’d pointed out that his dangerous job and unpredictable lifestyle weren’t conducive to raising a child, their arguments devolved until the barbs became more pointed and indelible.

Margo took out her phone and clicked on the text message Greer had sent her, pulling up the grainy photo.

She showed it to Luke.

He studied the image for a beat, his gaze hooded, and then he glanced back at her.

“Where did you get this?”

“Why were you at the bookstore?” she countered.

“I was picking out a book on naval history for my dad,” he replied, his voice completely deadpan.

“Nice try.”

“My dad likes books on naval history.”

“Why were you there?” she persisted.

“Who sent you the photo?”

Margo crossed her arms over her chest, resisting the urge to tap her right foot as Luke had once pointed out that she did when they fought. That was the trouble with them: they could read each other far too easily, knew each other’s tells.

“A client did,” Margo replied. “Let me guess—you were there for work. Someone hired you to track a book for them, and you went there because you knew he was the person to see when trying to source a rare book.”

Because you learned that from me.

After months of fighting over having kids and how they would juggle that with their careers, and the fact that they didn’t have the “village” everyone said they needed, Luke had suggested that if his job was the problem, perhaps he should change careers. With his background in art, the connections he’d built, the knack he had for tracking items, it had seemed only natural that they go into business together. After all, if she was worried about building her business and them raising a family, working together could help them with the balance.

In theory, it had sounded good. And in reality, they’d both been desperate to fix what was beginning to seem irrevocably broken. But it hadn’t been the solution they’d both craved. Instead, it had accelerated everything.

Luke hadn’t found the same enjoyment in sourcing antiques and other items that she had, and even though he’d never mentioned it, even as he pretended he was happy with the choice he’d made, she could tell that he regretted it, that he missed the thrill of his old job.

Now Reynolds-Walsh Acquisitions was as dead as their marriage, their two businesses as divorced as they were.

Last she’d heard—after all, their corner of the market was a relatively small one—he’d opened a successful investigations firm. For as hard as he worked, as smart as he was, she’d be lying if she said that it hadn’t stung a bit to see his company’s swanky address in Westminster. She’d looked up his website online in a moment of weakness and recognized that he likely had bypassed many of the early business growing pains that had plagued her, given the capital he’d started with courtesy of the family trust that had always provided him a safety net she’d never had.

“Why were you there?” Luke countered. “Was it personal or business?”

“I took on a new client this week. He’s an intermediary, and his boss wants me to acquire a book for him. A rare book.” She leveled him with a look. “I think it’s the same book you were hired to find. I confess—I’m a little confused, though. I heard you were mainly doing private investigations these days, fraud investigations for insurance companies, isn’t it?”

His eyes widened slightly, surprised perhaps by the realization that she’d followed his career.

“My company handles several types of investigative work.”

“Including finding rare books?”

He hesitated. “Not typically, no.”

“Then why were you there tonight?” Margo pressed him.

“I was helping out a colleague.”

She waited for him to elaborate, but infuriatingly, he didn’t.

“Mr. Thornton spoke to me before he died—while he was lying there dying.” Margo swallowed. “He told me to be careful. He said, ‘They want the book,’ or at least I think he did. I told the police, but I could tell they thought I was overreacting. I wasn’t—I wasn’t in the best state of mind.”

“Margo.” He said her name like an epithet. “Were you hired to find A Time for Forgetting ?”

Her heart pounded. “Yes.”

He swore. “Who is your client?”

“I’m not going to tell you that. Not unless you tell me who hired you.”

“No one hired me. You’re right—I don’t do that kind of work anymore. It didn’t suit me, but I suspect you knew that while we worked together.”

She did.

“One of the investigators who works for me was hired to find it. He had a personal relationship with the client, and so while it was a bit out of his normal depths, he agreed to do it as a favor. But he was hospitalized unexpectedly—gallbladder—and I took it over.” He hesitated as though he was choosing his words very, very carefully. “I heard he was trying to find a book, and given my time working with you—I thought I would be well positioned to help. I’d just finished a forgery job, so I had a few free days. It seemed simple enough.”

“I thought the same thing,” Margo admitted. “How much trouble could a book be?”

“Exactly.”

And now a man was dead.

“So, you went to see Mr. Thornton?” Luke asked.

“Yes. Yesterday. He told me someone had already been in his shop asking him about the same book. He had a file on his research so far; not much, but he was going to share it with me. That wasn’t you or one of your people, though, was it?”

Luke shook his head. “And you were meeting tonight so that Mr. Thornton could tell you what he had found?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you anything about the person?”

She gave him the basic description Mr. Thornton had shared with her. “Does that sound like your client?” Margo asked him.

“We haven’t met in person. All the correspondence has been online. But my client is a woman.” He studied her for a moment. “Do you think it was your client?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, though. All our communication has been through an intermediary. It doesn’t make sense to me that my client would hire me and then undermine me.”

“Did you get the impression that Thornton was afraid or had been threatened?” Luke asked.

“No. Not at all. If anything, he seemed interested in the mystery of why there was so much interest in this book suddenly. He was in good spirits when I saw him. He gave me a book to read.”

“Did he have any enemies?” Luke asked.

“I don’t think so. I saw him yesterday and he didn’t mention any; then again, we weren’t that close. If there was a problem, he might not have told me. We were professional associates.”

“You were more than that—you were friends. It was obvious that he cared about you.”

She struggled to push past the lump in her throat. “He was a kind man. I respected him a great deal.”

“I know,” Luke replied, the gentleness in his voice nearly too much to bear.

Margo glanced down at her feet, too embarrassed to meet his gaze lest he see the tears brimming in her eyes.

A splatter of blood marred the right side of her brown boot.

She jerked her head up, her stomach roiling, unable to handle the sight of that blood. She made the decision right then and there to throw away all the clothes she was wearing.

“Was tonight the first time you met with him about the book?” she asked, changing tack.

Luke nodded.

“What did he tell you?”

“Not much,” Luke admitted. “He was familiar with the book, which surprised me, considering I’d been led to believe it was obscure.” The glance he gave her was questioning, as though he was looking for confirmation that she had been told the same thing.

Margo inclined her head as if to say “yes.”

“He told me he would get back to me,” Luke added.

Was Mr. Thornton planning on letting her know that Luke was searching for the book? He’d worried about her after the divorce, so she wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if he had been, especially considering they had always been closer than he had been with Luke.

“Did you tell the police about the book?” Luke asked.

“I told them that he was helping me find a book. I didn’t get the impression that they thought it was particularly pertinent. They took down the information I gave them.

“The police think it was a robbery. Apparently, there had been some in the neighborhood. A bakery was hit. They think this was simply an escalation. Maybe Mr. Thornton fought back and the robbers acted impulsively.”

Every single time the thought was introduced, every instinct she had rejected it. She couldn’t imagine Mr. Thornton risking his life for money. A book, maybe? But a few hundred pounds? He would have cooperated.

“Did the till look like it had been disturbed?” Luke asked. “Were there signs of forced entry?”

Margo took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment, trying to remember her first impression of the store, trying to retrace her steps. She told him what she remembered of the scene, of the mess she’d found.

“Where did you find the body?” Luke asked.

“In the back room…There was a broken coffeepot. At first, I thought maybe that was what had injured him—silly, I know. The whole experience was just so surreal. I just never imagined—it hardly seemed like the kind of place where you’d find a dead body, much less a murdered one. But there was so much blood.” She took a deep breath, welcoming the rush of air into her lungs, taking the pause she needed to still her racing heart. “He was lying on his stomach, and I couldn’t tell if he was alive; I just knew he needed help, so I called emergency services.”

“You did exactly what you were supposed to do.”

She nodded, absorbing the words, wishing she could believe them. The truth was she had been turning those crucial moments between when she had found Mr. Thornton and when the paramedics declared him dead over and over in her mind, wondering if things would have turned out differently if she had acted with urgency sooner, if she had walked through the Tube station more quickly, if she hadn’t paused to check her email on her phone, if she had pressed harder to stanch the bleeding, if she had arrived a few minutes earlier.

“Whoever did this to him, I think they might have been in the shop while I was in the back room with him.”

“What do you mean? Did you see someone?”

“I heard a noise while I was on the phone with the operator. I thought it was the police, but the operator said they were still a couple minutes away. Someone was moving around the main part of the shop while I was in the back room with him. I heard the bell on the door. I think they fled out the front.”

Luke turned, walking toward the bar cart in the corner of his study. When he faced her again, he had two crystal glasses full of whiskey in hand.

The familiar scent filled the air, tugging at her memories.

She took the glass from him wordlessly, their fingers grazing.

She couldn’t hold it together much longer.

She downed the liquid.

Luke didn’t touch his.

“Do you think he was killed because of this book?” Margo asked. “I didn’t get the impression that it was particularly valuable. Rare, yes, but now it feels like I missed something—”

“I had the same impression as you. I’ve only been working on it for a few days. Like I said—I was finishing another job in Europe. Mitch’s hospitalization was unexpected, and who knows how long he’s going to be out. I hoped it would be an easy enough case to help with. The last thing Mitch needs to worry about is work, but that’s the sort of guy he is.”

So whoever hired Mitch had hired him before Greer and his boss hired her .

Luke was silent for a beat, then two. He took a sip of his liquid, studying her over the rim of the glass. “Something else is bothering you.”

Margo hesitated. “I think someone is following me.”

Luke set the glass on his desk.

Luke had always been one of the most self-contained people she had ever known. She could count on one hand the number of times she had seen him lose his temper, and all of them had been during the disastrous dissolution of their marriage.

She watched him fight for control now.

“After I left the initial meeting with my new client in Mayfair, I called Bea to make sure the wire had cleared before I got to work tracking down the book. It was crowded and snowing, and I noticed a guy walking behind me. There were some young girls between us, and it seemed like he was focusing on them. I was worried about them, so I kept an eye on him. But the girls left, and he was still there. I thought I’d lost him when I got on the Tube, but after I left the bookshop, he was on the platform when I hopped on the train from Notting Hill Gate. That’s when I recognized him, when I realized I’d seen him earlier, too.”

“And this was the first time you went to Mr. Thornton’s shop to ask him about this book?”

“Yes.”

“What did the man look like?”

“Blond hair. Broad shoulders. Tallish.”

“Six feet?”

She studied her ex-husband for a moment.

Luke was six-three; the man had been shorter and more broadly built.

“Around there, yes.”

“Eye color?”

She shook her head. “He was never close enough for me to say for certain. Light, maybe? He was pale. Muscular.”

“Any scars, tattoos, other features you can think of?”

“No.”

“Have you seen him again?”

“I don’t think so.” She studied him. “Have you noticed anyone following you? Does he sound familiar to you?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Someone took this picture, though,” Margo added, gesturing to her phone and the image stored there.

Luke nodded, his mouth in a grim line.

The fact that Luke hadn’t noticed someone watching him worried her.

He glanced away. “I was—I was distracted going to see Mr. Thornton. I wasn’t sure—I wasn’t sure how it would feel seeing him after so long. After everything.”

Silence fell between them.

“Did you tell the police about the man who was following you?” Luke asked.

“No. I honestly wasn’t thinking about it; I was so distracted by Mr. Thornton. Like I said, the police were convinced it was a robbery. They seemed more concerned with whether I had seen someone I could identify than any suggestions I had. I got the sense that they thought I was too shaken up to be credible. They dismissed what I told them about the book, and honestly, I think if I’d mentioned that I was worried someone was following me, they would have completely written me off.”

“What did they ask you?”

“Not much. They asked why we were meeting, what I knew about him, that sort of thing.”

“Who were the officers you talked to?”

Margo gave him their names.

“I’ve never heard of them, but I can ask around with some of my old colleagues from the Met.”

“Thank you.” She couldn’t help but wonder if he was checking on things because he was worried for her or because he was covering his own bases, considering he had an interest in the book, too.

“Are you going to talk to your client?” Margo asked him. “Do you think they could be responsible for this?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to find out, though. What about you? If someone is following me, your client seems the most likely one, considering they sent you that picture.”

It also hadn’t escaped her notice that Greer’s boss might have hired her for this job specifically because she was Luke’s ex-wife and they knew that his firm was looking for the book, too.

“What are you going to do?” Luke asked her. “Are you going to walk away from the job? Surely, you can’t keep working for them.”

How many times had they had a variation of this fight? In the past, even as it had bothered her, she’d understood that he worried, that he saw things in his job that haunted him, his view of the art world so different from the clients she had who collected items with joy and sent her kind notes when she sourced an item for them.

When they’d begun working together, Luke’s instinct to protect had only magnified, but what he’d never understood and what had taken a lot of therapy for her to understand was that growing up with only herself to rely on had made it difficult to trust others. Luke’s attempts to shield her from any unpleasantness in her business or life had her feeling panicked and trapped. Much like his suggestion that they have a child.

“I haven’t decided,” she lied, even though she fully intended to return the money and sever the relationship.

Luke opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, but he closed it just as quickly with a shake of his head.

“I wondered how you were doing,” Luke said. “If you were well.” He paused. “It’s been what—eighteen months?”

“Nineteen.”

“Nineteen,” he echoed in agreement.

The last time they saw each other, they had both been flanked by attorneys as they signed the final papers to end their marriage. They hadn’t spoken; there hadn’t been words to adequately express her emotions in the moment.

“I’ve been okay…until now,” Margo replied. “Busy. Work. You?”

“Same. I just got back from a job in Luxembourg.”

Luke had always maintained a grueling schedule when he worked in law enforcement, and she remembered the nights when he would come home to her in the late hours, stumbling into bed, exhaustion overtaking him as he reached for her, tucking her body into the curve of his as though it was the first time he’d come up for air. Those were her favorite moments as a wife, when he would reach for her and she could be there to offer him solace, when she wasn’t running herself ragged trying to juggle all the things that came at her. She’d hoped that working together would make it easier, but Luke was Luke, and if he wasn’t doing things at full throttle, then he wasn’t interested.

“Congratulations on your company, by the way,” Margo said. “I thought about saying something when I heard you’d gone into business for yourself, but I don’t know—I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, that you would want to hear from me—”

“I would have. Wanted to hear from you, I mean. But I understand why you didn’t reach out. When I heard about this case—how Mitch wasn’t going to be able to take it on after all—I thought about calling you and asking for help. After all, you’re the expert for finding things. I suppose Mr. Thornton felt—”

He didn’t finish the sentence, let the words hang between them, but then again she knew exactly what he meant.

Mr. Thornton felt safer , given how complicated everything was between them.

Margo took a deep breath, glancing back toward the direction of the kitchen before turning to face Luke once more.

“Please give my apologies to Sasha. I didn’t mean to startle her. I’m sorry I interrupted your evening.” She knew what she had to say, knew that circumstances required her to be gracious even as it scraped her raw to do it. “She seems lovely. I’m glad you’re happy. That you’re doing well.”

She was happy for him—truly. She’d always believed Luke deserved someone wonderful in his life. They’d just both realized too late that it wasn’t her.

“She is,” he replied, his voice so soft, she could barely hear it over the sound of blood rushing through her ears.

Time to go.

Margo took a step forward, instinct taking over to engage in some sort of polite goodbye—a hug, a kiss on the cheek—and then she froze.

What the hell was she doing?

Awkwardly, she raised her hand in a half-hearted wave.

Luke’s lips twitched.

Right.

“I’ll be in touch about the book once I talk to my client,” Luke said. “I’ll talk to the police, too.”

Margo’s legs couldn’t carry her fast enough out of the home she had once occupied.

She shoved her hands in her coat pockets as the blistering London cold greeted her once again. Her fingers curled around the flash drive Mr. Thornton had passed her.

Why did he give it to her? And what was on it?