Chapter 5
His eyes met mine.
“Everything I can.”
That answer bothered me.
I was about to say so when a woman’s voice rose from the Mercedes.
“Wait!”
Richard’s mistress had opened the rear passenger door.
One of the guards stepped forward, but Alexander lifted a hand.
The guard stopped.
The young woman emerged slowly.
I had met her only once before discovering the affair, though at the time Richard had introduced her as a junior consultant named Vanessa Hale.
Her blonde hair was damp around her face now, and the confidence she had worn inside the courthouse had disappeared.
Around her throat gleamed my mother’s emerald necklace.
My chest tightened.
Vanessa saw me staring.
She touched the pendant.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
I almost laughed.
“You didn’t know you were wearing another woman’s jewelry?”
“Richard told me it belonged to his grandmother.”
Richard’s face appeared behind the open car door.
“Vanessa, get back inside.”
She ignored him.
Her fingers fumbled with the clasp.
“I swear, Clara. He gave it to me last week.”
The necklace came free.
For one awful moment, I thought she might drop it onto the wet pavement.
Instead, she walked toward me.
The guards watched Alexander.
Alexander watched me.
Nobody moved.
Vanessa stopped two steps below me and held out the necklace.
My mother’s necklace.
A slim gold chain.
A teardrop emerald surrounded by tiny old-fashioned diamonds.
The green stone looked almost black beneath the storm clouds.
I reached for it.
The instant it touched my palm, I remembered my mother’s hands fastening it around her own throat.
Or maybe I remembered a photograph.
My memories of her had become difficult to separate from pictures over the years.
She had died when I was six.
At least, that was what I had always been told.
A highway accident.
My father had died two years before her.
After my mother’s death, I had moved between relatives for several months before entering foster care.
Everything from those years existed in fragments.
A yellow kitchen.
The smell of cinnamon.
A blue suitcase.
A woman’s laughter.
My mother’s green necklace.
I closed my fingers around it.
“Thank you,” I said.
Vanessa looked startled by the words.
Perhaps she expected anger.
I was angry.
Just not at her.
Not entirely.
She glanced toward Richard.
“There’s something else.”
“Vanessa,” Richard said sharply.
This time Alexander looked at him.
It wasn’t threatening.
It was simply a look that reminded everyone present that shouting would not control the conversation.