Page 63 of Over Her Dead Body

What amused me was the surprise.

All those cultivated people, stunned to discover that a girl treated like something rented might eventually be returned damaged.

Really.

How innocent people become when innocence is useful.

I stop there.

I asked for Emma Calloway.

Somehow, I have received a murderously polite explanation of why every person in that room deserved watching.

Annoying.

Useful.

Impossible to stop reading.

The interesting thing was not Lila.

That sounds unkind, but most true things do before they are framed correctly. Lila’s collapse was terrible. Inconvenient. Possibly even tragic, depending on who tells the story and whether her parents have enough money to demand the uglier version.

But Lila came with a script.

A girl upstairs at a party is not new. A locked staircase is not new. A room full of people pretending not to listen for sirens is certainly not new.

Martin Hale was.

CHAPTER 24

EMMA

The internet-stalking of Martin Hale began at Philip Dane’s house.

I didn’t get far. Every time I made it past the first page of results, someone needed something. Todd. Margot. Celeste. A woman collapsing upstairs without technically interrupting the party.

Now it is after two in the morning and I am home, still wearing the dress, sitting at my kitchen table with my laptop and a container of cold leftovers I do not remember taking from the refrigerator.

Sleep is not in my future.

Neither, apparently, is forgetting what I saw in Lisbon.

Blood across Reid’s shirt. One cuff soaked through. The knife disappearing into his waistband. The way he walked away afterward as though none of it required explanation.

I have been trying to make those images fit the man who stood in Philip Dane’s house tonight.

They don’t.

Seven years of marriage gave me plenty of reasons to be angry with Reid. Violence was never one of them.

So what happened in the ten years I thought he was dead?

Martin Hale may be the closest thing I have to an answer.

He has money, references, a business registration in Lisbon, and enough credibility to walk into my professional life without anyone asking the questions I cannot stop asking.

Whose blood was it?