“I’m sorry to interrupt, sir. But Montclair didn’t do it. I know he didn’t.”
Moreno narrowed his eyes at her. “Why, pray tell, would you want to rock the boat right now, Graham? You’re being promoted to detective. You’ve done exemplary work on this case. It’s a slam dunk. Even Robinson knows we’ve got Montclair dead to rights. He’s already been talking to the DA about a plea.”
“Sir, I’m willing to bet my career on this. Please.”
That got his attention. He glanced at the chief, then back to Holly, a hairy brow raised. “Talk.”
“The body we recovered? It isn’t Sutton Montclair.”
SUTTON
“Life is full of confusion. Confusion of love, passion, and romance. Confusion of family and friends. Confusion with life itself. What path we take, what turns we make. How we roll our dice.”
—Matthew Underwood
MEMENTO MORI
I asked so little from this life. A husband. A family. Friends. Love, to give and receive. That’s all.
And I got them. Oh, did I get them.
So when I fled my perfectly horrible life, I wanted even less.
A warm bed in a cozy garret. A garden with green ferns and white flowers. Cafés and rain, a good book, a comfortable pen to write with. Long walks, watching lovers stroll arm in arm, and painters’ brushes sparkling in the dew. Solitude. I asked for solitude.
And I asked for inspiration, enough to fill four hundred pages, yes. I don’t believe it is too much to ask for, is it? The desire to sit and write, to pour words onto the page, to create. It is what I do. What I did. Lusciously, deliberately. In the comforting absence of my life.
I did not expect the company of loneliness.
I did not ask to become involved.
I did not ask for the sharpness of a blade, flashing silver in the moonlight. The chaos, the cries. The sirens and rough questions and the thick wetness of blood on my palms.
Nor the stares, the stares, the stares.
ELLE EST ARRIVéE
It was a dream Sutton Montclair had, moving to Paris.
She spent time on this dream. Invested energy. Imagined what it would be like: feeling a bit like Goldilocks as she worked her way through the possible housing list, hunting high and low for the perfect flat. The apartment on the Rue Faubourg would be much too expensive, the one near Notre-Dame too shabby.
When the dream became a plan, she did most of her research by watching reality television shows catering to international clients—Sutton Montclair is moving 4,300 miles from Franklin, Tennessee, to Paris, France! She narrowed down which arrondissement would be right for her. She wanted something slightly off the beaten path, residential, away from the tourist areas. She would hire the same real estate agent featured on the show to find her the perfect spot.
“A garret, that’s what I’m looking for, something with Parisian charm, a good café nearby, and Metro access. Private, anonymous, French.”
The agent immoblier would come through. She always came through. The woman had a reputation to uphold, after all.
It would take three days, but Sutton would end up in a charming furnished one bedroom in the 7th Arrondissement, on the Left Bank, with a picture-perfect view of the Eiffel Tower from the open living room. It would cost her a small fortune, but she had the advance money. After a brief negotiation, she’d secure the flat for a pirate’s ransom, but she’d still have enough to live on for a year, if necessary. She was grateful her publisher hadn’t asked for the money back when they canceled her contract. She was free of them, free of her old life. She could do what she wanted, write for herself. Escape. She just needed a small, brief escape from the vagaries of her life.
She would move in the same day; the tourist season was ending and the owner was tired of short-term rentals. He’d been working with a property company that catered to tourists and was desperate to leave the city and retire to Chamonix, where he planned to run a small coffee shop and ski as much as possible. The real estate agent would tell her the owner was grateful for the unexpected and quick offer to rent the apartment for a year, payment in full, up front.
Moving in wouldn’t take long; she’d only have a backpack with her new laptop, new tablet, and a few worn, well-loved notebooks, a battered Hartmann carry-on bag she’d found at a local Goodwill store, along with three changes of brand-new clothes, all black, and some basic toiletries. Everything else she’d left behind.
Everything, and everyone.
And when the door closed, and she was alone, she would look around her new life. Spare. Empty. Perfect.
Safe.
What amazed her was how closely her long-held fantasy resembled her reality. Her new reality.
It didn’t take as long as she expected. It always pays to do your research. She found the perfect flat in the perfect area on the most perfect street the first day. Took the keys, handed over twelve months’ rent, and climbed the stairs to her new world in her gilded, ivory tower.
She’d escaped with her life. And really, that was all she could ask, wasn’t it?
*
Sutton dragged the Louis XIV desk in front of the window, set all her writing tools on the worn wooden top. She had no internet access yet, no wireless, which wasn’t an issue; she’d logged out of all of her accounts before she left, changed passwords to nonsense no one could figure out, especially her. Every single one, from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram (look, cats!) to Gmail. She’d downloaded all the files that mattered onto a thumb drive and put them on the new laptop, then reset her Dropbox account. Turned off all cloud support. It was damn hard to disappear these days, but it was doable, if you were smart. And Sutton was very, very smart.
No one had her new phone number, no friends, no business associates. Nor Ethan. Especially not Ethan.
She ignored the stab his name elicited, continued tidying her new space.
Ethan didn’t know where she was. He was probably beginning to miss her now. Or not. She didn’t care. She’d left a short, to-the-point note on the kitchen counter, on the richly veined Carrara marble she’d lovingly handpicked when they renovated the house. Don’t look for me, it said. I need some time.
As planned, she’d walked to downtown Franklin, caught an Uber car she paid for with a Visa gift card, had him take her to the airport in Atlanta, tipped him $300 so he wouldn’t say anything, dropped the disposable burner phone in the toilet and flushed it clean away, then hopped a plane and flew off to Paris, with her shiny new hair and her shiny new name and her shiny new passport.
Standing in her new living room, in her new city, her new country, her new life, the windows flung open to the cool spring afternoon, the scrolled wrought iron balconette holding her back from stepping into the sky, the birds chirping in the trees along the street in front of her, the red roofs leading to the view—the view!—of the Eiffel Tower, she took three quick breaths, pulled her newly dark hair out of its messy ponytail, and shook it down her back.