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The days following Cody’s arrest for Tyson’s murder were an emotional roller coaster.

The recording from the kitchen security camera was enough for the police to charge him not only with Tyson’s murder but with Ian’s as well, and once he was detained, he quickly confessed, not wanting to go through the spectacle of a lengthy trial after already having admitted on video to what he’d done.

He also copped to having pushed me off the boat, having rationalized it would be a lot easier to pin Tyson’s murder on me if I wasn’t around to refute the story. But he changed his mind at the last minute and dived in after me, sorry for what he’d done.

To my relief, he didn’t mention my part in the cover-up of Ian’s death. Whether out of remorse for having tried to kill me or gratitude for my saving his life, I wasn’t sure.

He was relocated to a holding facility in St. Martin, and Jennifer moved to a house there to be closer to him, though from what Samira told me, Cody refused to speak to her.

I was surprised Jennifer still wanted anything to do with him after she learned what he’d done to the father of her child, but perhaps she really did love him.

And Cody hadn’t known that Tyson stole Ian’s work.

My name was cleared immediately, though I was asked to stay on the island awhile longer to provide testimony.

I didn’t tell Samira that I’d been the one to leave the arrest report on Tyson’s pillow.

It had been the reason Cody killed him in the end, and she was already beating herself up for giving it to him, so I let her believe Tyson had been the one to leave it there, that he had inadvertently been the engineer of his own demise.

But I knew it was my fault Tyson was murdered.

I’d been so angry with him after I returned from La Petite Plage that I’d wanted to warn him I knew the truth of his duplicity. That I could hurt him more than he could hurt me. And I was right; in the end, I did, didn’t I?

I didn’t know that he wouldn’t come home that night, that Samira would find the arrest report and, seeing Cody’s name on it, hand it off to him. I didn’t know Cody had killed Ian because he believed Ian had turned him in, or that Cody would kill Tyson as well when he learned the truth.

Poor long-suffering Cody. It was my fault he learned the truth, and though I can safely say I wouldn’t have told him if I’d known how it would all turn out, I did also believe he deserved to know.

I didn’t want Tyson to die, didn’t want Cody to go to prison.

But I comforted myself with the knowledge that the truth is buoyant; like an Air Jordan buried for years in the Everglades, eventually it rises to the surface.

After a few days of my guilt eating away at me, I confessed my part in Tyson’s demise to Laurent. But he had a different point of view, reminding me that it was Tyson’s own paranoia that had made him susceptible to Jennifer’s blackmail plot, setting off the chain of events that ended his life.

Tyson had chosen to turn his brother in all those years ago, had chosen to cover up Ian’s death and steal his technology.

And while those choices may have made Tyson a billionaire, over the years the lies had destroyed him from the inside out, transforming him from the driven young man I’d known to the cynical specter he’d become.

It’s hard to comprehend the sprawl of the decisions we make, our choices colliding with those of others to create an impossibly tangled web that can come undone with the pull of a single thread.

But Tyson made his own decisions; he was both the creator and the destroyer of his own life.

—

Samira was too overwhelmed to plan a funeral straightaway, electing instead to do a celebration of life in a few months, when she’d had time to process Tyson’s death.

She and Gisèle planned to return to Paris once the loose ends had been tied up, but in the meantime, they’d moved back into Le Rêve, which was where I found them when I walked over to say goodbye the day before I was to be allowed to return home.

A heaviness clung to Samira as she lounged on a divan on the covered veranda, smoking cigarette after cigarette. “I know I should stop,” she said, blowing a line of smoke out at the blue sky.

“Your husband just died,” I said. “Give yourself time.”

“I hope you’ll come to the celebration of life,” she said. “It will be in northern California I think, though I don’t know where yet. You should bring your boys.”

I took a sip of the green juice Laurent’s replacement had prepared. “That’s so kind of you. It would be good for the boys to meet you, and their other half-siblings.”

My heart tugged at just the thought of my boys. I’d been away from them for a week now, the longest we’d ever been apart, and I missed them so much it hurt.

“How’s Laurent?” Gisèle asked.

“Yes,” Samira chimed in. “Tell us something happy.”

I tucked my bare feet beneath me on the plush white outdoor couch, gazing out toward the calm sea. “Good, all things considered.”

“Go on,” Gisèle encouraged. “You’ve been staying with him, haven’t you?”

I nodded.

Laurent’s cozy two-bedroom bungalow was nothing fancy, but it was airy and bright and full of mementos from his travels and photos of his life.

In the evenings, we sat in the chairs on the shaded front porch, talking until the sea below was swallowed by the night, when we went to bed early but didn’t sleep until late.

I told him the ugly truth, all of it, and he listened patiently, without judgment.

He was able to intuit when I needed space and when I needed the graze of his lips on my neck, when I wanted to vent and when I wanted advice figuring out the mess my life had suddenly become, when I wanted to make love, and when I needed him to make me forget my name.

Laurent had been scheduled to work for Tyson through the end of the month, after which he’d planned to return to France, but he’d handed off his responsibilities to another butler early, the one who was now refilling my green juice as I considered how to reply to Gisèle.

“I’ve had a hard couple of days,” I said. “But he’s made them easier.”

My answer wasn’t what Gisèle had been looking for, but she was perceptive enough not to press.

I felt strangely protective of my budding relationship with Laurent.

Had circumstances been different, had it been the vacation fling I’d imagined it would be, I would have been happy to tell her all about how incredible he was in bed.

The man pressed buttons I didn’t even know I had.

But what we had was turning out to be more than physical, and as thrilled as I was by that, it was ours—just ours.

“What are you going to do when you get home?” Gisèle asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You have all this money now.” It was true, Tyson’s will set aside a generous amount for the boys’ schooling as well as half a million per year for me as trustee, until the boys were twenty-one.

To him, it must have seemed like pennies, but after living off far less than that for so many years, it seemed like a windfall to me. “Are you going to keep working?”

I nodded. “With the media circus around everything that happened, we have more cases pouring in than we know what to do with. But I’m going to hire a few people to do the legwork and take a step back for a minute to spend some time with my kids.

They’ll be out of school for the summer soon, and I’ve never had much of a chance to travel, so I was thinking we might take off for a while. ”

“Maybe visit Laurent in France?” Gisèle needled.

I smiled. “We’ll see. Have you talked to Allison?”

Samira nodded. “She came by yesterday to check on me. It sounds like Rick Halpern, the investor Tyson brought on before he died, is a better partner than Tyson ever was.”

“Rémy’s partner,” I said.

She nodded as my phone buzzed and I saw Laurent’s name on the screen. “I’ve gotta run,” I said. “Laurent’s outside. He’s taking me surfing since it’s my last day.”

Samira threw her arms around my neck. “I’ll see you in California?”

I nodded, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “Until then.”