Page 5 of The Expat Affair

My hangover evaporates on the long trek home, thanks to an unexpected drizzle in the frigid January air, a chicken and avocado sandwich I scarf down on my shortcut through the Vondelpark, and the climb to my apartment at the top of four flights of the steepest stairs known to man.

By the time I finally push through my front door, I’m panting, but feeling much more like myself.

My room is at the end of a short hall, a cramped space with slanted walls and a tiny window that leaks when it rains, but for €500 a month, the price is right.

I step over the clothes and shoes littering the floor, pluck my laptop from the charger, and collapse with it on the bed.

All morning long, the questions went round and round in my head.

Who killed Xander? Why him and not me? How am I still alive?

That last one, especially.

I try not to think about it too hard, but it’s impossible.

A man was murdered while I slept in the next room.

He took his last breath while I snored away in his bed, oblivious. It’s a miracle I’m not in the drawer next to Xander at the morgue.

I shove the morbid thoughts away and wriggle the mouse, and my eyes bulge at the number sitting at the top of my text app.

More messages than people in my address book, which since the divorce, has become paper thin.

Most are from my sister, Addison, and my heart clangs with alarm.

Automatically, my thoughts go to my father and his affinity for fried foods despite his dangerously high cholesterol, my mother who climbs behind the wheel at all hours of the day and night even though she can’t see a lick in the dark, my sister, Addison, and her two small kids including my daredevil nephew with his predilection for diving headfirst off couches and beds.

Or maybe Barry finally drove off that cliff.

I point the mouse at the top message and give it a tap.

Niiiiiice, sis. But imma need details, pronto.

Where are you? Whose bling?

Seriously, Ray, stop ignoring me and call me back.

WHY AREN’T YOU ANSWERING ME???

The rest are more of the same, urgent and insistent cries for me to respond or else, typical fare for my bossy older sister.

I back out of the string as a memory pulses, the image of Xander with my phone, grinning at me from above.

Were we at his house? In his bed? I blink, and the vision is gone, as insubstantial as smoke.

The next message is from a phone number not labeled with a name, though I recognize it as belonging to a former friend, one who told me secretly that she hated Barry for what he did, but not enough to rock the boat in our tiny Louisiana town.

It’s shocking, actually, how many people did that—worked themselves into knots flip-flopping from lame excuse to lame excuse.

Their husbands worked with Barry.

They were neighbors, friends, members of the same country club. In the end, Barry’s money and status eclipsed his misdeeds.

Or maybe it’s just that my own misdeeds loomed so much larger.

Yes, it does. Don’t tell you-know-who I said so but good for you.

I frown. The message doesn’t make much sense, and neither do any of the others further down.

Hahaha looks like you’re settling in just fine.

Whoa, maybe I should come for a visit. You can introduce me to your new friends.

As grasping as ever, I see. IDK what you’re trying to prove with that picture but honey this isn’t it.

I lurch upright in bed, the memory thudding in my temples.

The picture. Oh, shit, the picture.

I flip to Instagram, where things are even worse. DMs and comments in the high double digits, along with a picture me in my full, sexed-up glory. My hair, big and pillow-mussed. My lips, swollen from his kisses. My half-mast eyes, smiling at the camera like I’m not completely naked.

Or—almost naked. One hand clutches Xander’s duvet to my chest, fluffy white fabric that provides some cover, but not nearly enough. The left side dips dangerously low, exposing a generous slice of waist and . . . I gasp, leaning in for a closer look. Is that a nipple?

Oh, God. Let’s just pray my mother is still asleep.

I cringe at the caption—Amsterdam looks good on me, don’t you think? W

It wasn’t the city I was referring to but the spectacular jewels Xander had just hung from my neck, a complicated collar of hundreds of white and yellow stones. I can still feel the weight of the piece, the chill of the cool metal and rocks against my skin. A prototype he’d been working on, Xander had told me when I’d asked if it was real. His comment is pinned to the top of the string.

Like a Cullinan, all sparkle and fire.

Whatever that means.

In the few hours it’s been up, the post generated a flurry of likes and comments from handles I don’t know and have never heard of, but also from Ingrid, three fire emojis followed by a somewhat perplexing #readywhenyouare. As generous as my roommate is with her comments, they don’t always make much sense. Her English is good but apparently not that good.

And that brown smudge just below the biggest stone, a cushion-cut whopper the size of a small plum, is definitely a nipple, dammit.

I tap View Insights, and my eyes bug. Three thousand accounts reached how? I don’t have three hundred followers. I don’t have anywhere close. I delete the picture, even though I’m pretty sure that won’t be the end of it. Those people in my DMs and text app? They’re the kind of assholes who take screenshots.

There’s a sudden pattering above my head, a mixture of rain and sleet pinging against the window high on the slanted wall. On the other side of the glass, the weather has turned, a ceiling of low-hanging clouds that match my mood. Detective Boomsma with all his judgmental questions and blank stares was right to drop one thought in my head: I know very little about the man whose bed I spent most of last night in.

A gemologist—a successful one with plenty of money to burn. I know that from the obligatory scroll I did through his Instagram after his first DM hit my inbox. Pictures of fast cars, cityscape views from his penthouse, dinners in fancy restaurants or crowded VIP tables at nightclubs, big jets that carted him off to foreign cities or windswept beaches. His page was like an advertisement for the American Express black card, filled with exotic places and gorgeous, glamorous people. I tried not to think too hard about why that made me say yes to a dinner date with him, or what he might possibly see in me.

I spend the next few hours on Google, combing through every single link the internet has to offer about Xander van der Vos, following every sticky fingerprint he left on the World Wide Web, and there are a lot. Social media hits and news reports and prime-time television interviews and profile articles printed in glossy magazines. They’re not all in English but there are enough for me to get the gist. Xander wasn’t just some handsome, wealthy Tinder date I found dead on the floor of his shower. Here in Amsterdam, in the international world of diamonds and jewelry design, Xander was a big fucking deal.

Paris Hilton. Eva Longoria. Amy Adams. A whole slew of Kardashians. I guess he forgot to mention he has some of the world’s biggest celebrities on speed dial, or that those are his custom designs weighing down their wrists and ring fingers.

He also failed to mention he worked for one of the oldest and most respected diamond houses in all of Europe, or that he headed up the house’s latest venture, a bespoke line of luxury jewelry featuring lab-grown diamonds. Tennis necklaces of fifty-plus carats and marble-sized solitaires that go for a hundred grand a pop. A tenth of what a mined diamond would cost, but still more than most people can afford. Big Diamond Energy, he called it, and it came with an even bigger price tag.

Is that what that necklace was—lab-grown diamonds? According to everything I’ve read, still valuable. Is that why Xander is dead, because he was hawking diamonds with six-digit price tags? Like the necklace I took off and carefully handed back, only for Xander to chuck it in a drawer. As charming as he was with me, as impressive as his internet footprint is, he was also known in the industry as something of a villain.

I flip back to one of the longer articles I came across, an in-depth profile of Xander after House of Prins announced the plans for a lab-grown line. The author positions him as a visionary in the same paragraph they call him a disruptor. They say his lab-grown line is taking a wrecking ball to the market for mined stones, that it will tank their prices. They say by horning in on the mined diamond market, Xander is a traitor to the entire industry.

“I prefer to see myself as a pioneer,”

the author quotes him as saying. “The diamond industry is going through an existential crisis. Lab-grown diamonds are without a doubt the biggest innovation the jewelry industry has ever seen. We can scale them, grade them, set them just like mined stones to create high jewelry, but at a fraction of the cost. A new influx of customers who can suddenly afford to purchase a flawless House of Prins diamond. I’ve spent the past decade studying the world’s most powerful consumers—the American Affluent—and where America goes, the rest of the world follows.”

I snort—the American Affluent. Makes me wonder what on earth Xander saw in me. My nipple, probably.

I land on a photograph of Xander with another man. Tall, six-feet plus, and lean like Xander, with horn-rimmed glasses and a thatch of dark brown hair. The caption is in Dutch, but I hit Translate and it reads, “Rocking the industry: House of Prins launches luxury line of lab-grown diamonds.”

The man’s name is Thomas Prins, and he’s holding a lab-grown whopper in the palm of his hand, a diamond so big, I’d have to sell an organ on the black market to be able to afford it. A double row of pave diamonds serves as its band, and tucked under a hidden halo of diamonds below the solitaire? A secret, custom stone “for her eyes only.”

What kind of buyer wants to hide their diamonds? One who can afford to drop a hundred grand on a ring, I suppose. One who chucks priceless necklaces in the nightstand drawer.

“There you are,”

Ingrid says from just behind me. “I’ve only been calling you for the past hour.”

I twist around, taking in her pretty face framed by long blond curls, windswept and damp from the rain. Her winter coat a painfully fashionable beige and brown thing that’s normally fluffy, now looks like it’s made of wet teddy bear.

I tip the laptop closed. “Ingrid, did you hear about the man who was found dead in his shower?”

Ingrid grew up in Amsterdam. Her family lives here, in a city where news travels fast, especially bad news. If Xander’s death isn’t plastered on the front page of every news site in town by now, it will be soon.

“The guy with the ritssluiting?”

She mimes threading a zip tie with her hands, her keys jangling from a pinkie. “Sorry, I don’t know the word in English.”

“Zip tie.”

I shudder at the memory of Xander’s empty eyes, his lolling tongue, the claw marks at the thin band of plastic squeezing his neck, the red swirls in the water where a finger was supposed to be. “That was him, Ingrid. That was Xander. I found him right after I got off the phone with you.”

Her shock is almost comical. She stumbles, catching herself in the doorway as a hand flies to her mouth. Her eyes growing wide above her fingers. “Wait. Xander is dead?”

I nod. “It was awful. He was just lying there, and it was obvious he was . . . His throat. His eyes.”

I shudder, the memories coming back in terrible flashes. “I got out of there as fast as I could, and then I called the police.”

“Oh my God, . Oh my God. I—I can’t believe this.”

She steps into the room, shoving some clothes from a wooden chair before collapsing onto it. “What did the police say? Do they know who did this? Did you see?”

“No. Apparently, I slept through the whole thing, which I’m kind of assuming is what saved me. The room was dark. It’s possible the killer didn’t know I was in there. I don’t know. I have no idea why I’m still alive.”

I watch an angry patch of clouds chug by the window above my head and picture Detective Boomsma’s face, the heat of his gaze as he peppered me with questions I couldn’t quite answer, the way he tried very hard not to frown when I kept circling around the same answers. I don’t know. I was asleep. I was drunk.

Ingrid blows out a loud, hard breath. “Wow, . This is just . . . Wow. Did you . . . Do you have a lawyer?”

“You think I need a lawyer?”

“Yes, , I think you need a lawyer. A man is dead, and you were there when it happened. You don’t know what the police are thinking, what kind of evidence they’ve got, how much of it points to you. What if they don’t find someone else to point a finger at? You could be the only viable suspect.”

“Except I didn’t do it. And think about it, Ingrid: little me, in a hand-to-hand fight to the death with a man as large as Xander. Physically, it’s impossible. And what possible motive do I have? I actually liked the guy.”

“That necklace in the picture is a pretty big motive.”

“That necklace wasn’t real. I’m pretty sure he said it was a prototype.”

“A prototype that looks like it costs a fortune.”

“If that’s true, then why did he just . . . hang it on my neck like it was a toy? Why would he chuck it in the drawer? Shouldn’t he have been more careful? Shouldn’t he have, I don’t know, locked it away in a safe?”

I say the words with more conviction than I feel. Even if the diamonds in that necklace were lab grown, they would have been worth a shit-ton of money.

“Is that where he got it, out of his safe?”

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to remember what came before he hung it on my neck, but my memories are fuzzy at best. Champagne, music, laughter, sex. They’re all running together in a twisting, spiraling loop.

“I have no idea. The necklace just . . . appeared. I wouldn’t have remembered it at all if it weren’t for that stupid picture. What happened before and after is just snippets.”

Ingrid doesn’t respond. She just stares at me like the detective did, like she’s not entirely sure of my answers, either.

“Anyway, I’ve been doing some digging, and this company Xander worked for sells lab diamonds.”

I peel open the laptop, unlocking the screen with my fingerprint. “The same chemical makeup as mined diamonds, same brilliance and shine, but for a fraction of the price, which a lot of people in the industry aren’t happy about. From everything I’ve read, there are dozens of people who might want him dead.”

“So what, you think his murder had something to do with the fake diamonds he was selling?”

“They’re not fakes. Lab-grown diamonds look, feel, and sparkle just like mined diamonds. Not even a jeweler can tell the difference between the two, not without a special machine that measures things like luminescence and fluorescence and some other complicated shit I don’t know anything about. Something to do with the stone’s growth structure.”

Ingrid tilts her head, frowning as she studies me. “You know an awful lot about this stuff.”

“I’m good at research.”

It’s one of the few perks of my English Lit degree from LSU, that I can retain long passages, analyze them down to a sentence or two. I tap a finger to my laptop screen, bright with the House of Prins homepage. “Honestly, I don’t understand all the science, but what I do know is that lab-growns are still super expensive.”

Ingrid lifts a shoulder. “And money is a big motivator. It makes sense the killer was there for diamonds, I guess. People have certainly killed for less.”

I sit back on the bed, and the tight knot I’ve been carrying around between my shoulders loosens just a tad. Most likely the killer is someone from the diamond world, or someone who knew Xander and knew the value of the stones he dealt with every day. A neighbor, perhaps, or even a friend. Maybe they thought Xander brought some of these big rocks home and wanted them for themselves. Or maybe it’s a revenge killing, one of the dozens of people calling Xander a traitor online.

“Did he get any?”

Ingrid says, and I frown. “Diamonds, I mean. That necklace couldn’t have been the only piece Xander had lying around. Did the killer get more?”

“I don’t know. I ran out of there so fast, I didn’t see anything other than the bedroom and the hall to the elevator. It’s possible, I guess.”

Still, it doesn’t make any sense. If the killer was there for the diamonds, then why murder the guy? It’s not like Xander had diamonds on him in the shower. And what kind of diamond thief carries around a zip tie? This feels like more than a robbery gone wrong.

She leans back in my chair, blowing out a long breath. “Jesus, . This is some serious shit.”

I nod. The understatement of the century.

I think of Xander on his shower floor, the water washing away the blood and whatever evidence might have been sitting on his skin or under his nails.

Is that why they took his finger, because it clawed into the killer’s skin? I think of my DNA lying in a puddle on the floor or in a laboratory somewhere, and my legs grow wobbly all over again.

When I let that detective drive me to the station, it was because I was convinced that guiltlessness is on my side.

That sometime very soon the cops would find a speck of evidence the killer left behind, a clue that will lead them away from me.

But what if that’s why the killer chose that very moment, when Xander was in the shower, because it was a convenient spot to wash away his DNA? What if the only foreign DNA in Xander’s apartment is mine?

My heart gives a hard kick. “You know how these things work in this country, Ingrid. What would you do if you were me?”

“That’s easy.”

She blows out another breath as she pushes up off the chair, pointing at the laptop with the end of a sharp key.

“First I’d call a lawyer, and then I’d wipe the internet clean of the picture of you in that necklace. Because if the killer sees you in that necklace, he’ll know he left behind a witness.”