Chapter 8: She Came Back
I didn't expect Genevieve to return.
That was my mistake.
At seven that evening, while Conrad was on a call with the financial crimes unit and Wren was in the sitting room going through documents with a detective named Sloane who had arrived forty minutes earlier, my front gate buzzer sounded.
The security monitor showed Genevieve's car.
She was alone.
I pressed the intercom.
"Genevieve."
"Dorian." Her voice was smooth.
Composed.
"I'd like to come in.
I want to talk."
"There's a detective here."
A pause.
"I know.
That's why I came back." Another pause.
"I'm not running.
I want you to know that.
Whatever happens next — I'm not running."
I looked at the monitor for a long moment.
Then I pressed the gate release.
She walked in through the front door without her bag.
No phone visible.
Her hands were open at her sides — a deliberate choice, I realized.
She wanted to be seen as unarmed.
She had thought about how to walk through this door.
Detective Sloane stepped into the hallway.
"Ms.
Sutter."
Genevieve looked at her, then at me.
"I want to speak to Dorian first.
Alone.
Two minutes."
"That's not—" Sloane began.
"Two minutes," Genevieve said.
"In the kitchen.
Door open.
Then I'll answer every question you have."
Sloane looked at me.
I nodded once.
We stood in the kitchen — the same kitchen where it had all started that morning, the broken glass long since swept away, the roses gone.
Genevieve stood near the island.
I stood near the door.
"Fletcher is gone," she said.
"He left the country this afternoon.
I didn't know he was going to do that."
"Where?"
"I don't know.
He stopped answering my calls at four o'clock." Something moved across her face — not quite fear, not quite anger.
Betrayal, maybe.
The specific kind that comes from being abandoned by someone you trusted to stay.
"He took the account records with him.
Everything that was in his name."
"Conrad already has the freeze in place," I said.
"And Tessa Vane sent everything this afternoon."
Genevieve's eyes closed briefly.
When they opened, she looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen from her before.
Not calculation.
Not performance.
Something closer to exhaustion.
"I didn't know about Richard Calloway," she said.
"Not what Fletcher did to him.
I didn't know."
"Wren Calloway is in the next room," I said.
Genevieve went very still.
"She has twenty-two months of documentation," I said.
"She has the emails between you and Pryce.
She has the timeline.
She has the handwriting analysis from her father's estate." I watched her face.
"If there's a version of this where you didn't know what Fletcher did to Richard Calloway, now is the time to say so to the detective.
Not to me."
Genevieve looked at the kitchen floor.
The same floor where Yasmin had knelt that morning, holding my sons away from the glass.
"I wanted your money," she said quietly.
"I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
That's what I came back to say." She looked up.
"But I didn't want anyone hurt.
I didn't want the boys hurt.
What I said this morning — about Switzerland, about sending them away — I said it to frighten Yasmin.
To keep her quiet." Her voice was flat now.
Stripped of everything.
"I know that doesn't make it better."
"No," I said.
"It doesn't."
She nodded once.
Then she walked past me into the hallway, toward the sitting room, toward Detective Sloane.
At the doorway she stopped.
She didn't turn around.
"The photographs," she said.
"The ones of me with the boys at the park.
At the charity events." A pause.
"Some of those were real.
I want you to know that.
Some of those mornings were actually real."
I didn't answer.
She walked into the sitting room.
I stood in the kitchen alone for a moment.
May you like
Then I heard Nico cry — a small, sleepy sound from upstairs, the kind that meant he had woken and wanted to know someone was there.
I went upstairs.
