Page 58 of The Princess and the P.I.

When her sister and father arrived at Maurice’s condo they barreled through his place like they owned it.

Esi stretched and padded around the house, opening pantries and cabinets.

She pulled open the high-end glass-fronted refrigerator with rows of fancy water and fruit, color coordinated so that apples and bell peppers, pears and chives were inexplicably stored together.

Esi smacked her lips derisively at the handle-free cabinets.

“So, this is how he lives, eh?”

“It’s a nice place,” Fiona said. It was actually palatial.

You could commit a murder in Maurice’s living room.

The condo’s plush carpeting and high walls had conspired to deaden every breath, every heartbeat.

You could scream and not be heard outside of this space.

That’s what Fiona wanted to do. Just scream.

“So a four-story luxury condo with a rooftop patio you could land a helicopter on? It’s more than nice, Fiona.” She waited a beat, then added, “No telling how many girls he brings here.”

“Esi, please don’t start—”

“Fiona, he takes us from our house, forcibly. Just to hurt Dad. You know this is what this is all about. Just please let your sense be as tall as you are, eh—” Esi’s voice had slipped into her mother’s sweet lilt.

She was anxious, and it was hard not to feed on her nervous energy.

Fiona had that feeling she always got as the youngest—that people were discussing important things without her.

Esi followed Fiona into a large space just off the sunken living area and was immediately swallowed by a room that felt entirely separate from the rest of the house.

It was warm and wood paneled, and there was a low hum of some machinery.

She instinctively knew this was where Maurice spent most of his time.

The beating heart of his home. She inhaled the clean scent of cedar and cotton as the full-mooned November night poured in through tall, arched windows.

Fiona wanted to live in this room. Bolts of cloth stood in rows along the walls—silks in deep jewel tones, soft wools in muted earth shades, and delicate cottons.

But it was the unfinished quilts that truly made her and Esi gasp. Hanging from the walls like tapestries, his works displayed a precision that bordered on the supernatural. Each one in various stages of completion.

“He’s a genius,” Fiona muttered. She ran her hand across the tiny squares and triangles, fabric soft and cool beneath her touch.

The owner of this room was patient, attentive to detail, and loved complex, delicate things.

Falling in love, Fiona realized, was a continual thing. It just kept happening.

“Esi.” Fiona pressed the bridge of her nose between her fingers, feeling like, for no earthly reason other than there being quilts in a room, that she was about to cry.

“Please go and prepare the downstairs for Dad.” By prepare , she meant walking around the area in prayer for no less than forty-five minutes until any negativity was cleansed from the space.

Esi didn’t argue for once and left the room.

“Could you close that door?” Maurice stood like a statue in the living room. “We have some ugly business to take care of.”

—

An hour after Kofi’s blessing of the basement, it was ten p.m. and Maurice, Fiona, and Esi were sitting in a semicircle facing Kofi like they were planning an intervention.

Maurice didn’t speak for a while, let the quiet seep into the cracks between them.

He didn’t mind the silence, and Maurice wasn’t interested in what Kofi had to say just yet.

He was laying his own foundation, brick by brick.

He snatched a look at Fiona then quickly looked away.

If he rested too long on her face he would try to bend the world back to before he knew this.

He would try to have the truth and Fiona too.

But those two things were incompatible now.

“You’re Ashanti, right?” Maurice finally said.

A flicker of something passed between all of them. All three shoulders drew back. Proud.

“Of course.” Kofi lifted his chin.

Maurice nodded. “Fun fact. The Ashanti. Got their name from obliterating their enemies.” He let that sit in the air too. “But you don’t need me telling you—”

Kofi’s face darkened. “And yet here you are, doing it anyway.”

Maurice held up his hands. “Apologies. Let’s skip across the pond then. You ever heard of the Maroon War in Jamaica? Queen Nanny?”

Silence.

“No?” Maurice’s smile was thin, humorless. “Tacky’s Rebellion? You’d like them. They made trophies out of their enemies’ heads.”

Kofi’s jaw tightened. “Where is this going?”

“The cost of these rebellions was so high, the British banned the slave trade,” Maurice said, smooth as glass.

“They gave some colonial bullshit reasons. Too vicious, too bloodthirsty. Yada yada. Never forget a wrong.” He paused.

“As much as I hate to admit it, the British might’ve been right about one thing.

” He met Kofi’s eyes, gaze unyielding. “It cost too fucking much to cross one of you.”

The room was holding its breath.

“All those pictures you saved of your son.” Maurice’s voice dipped lower. “Showing up to the TechXpo. Hard for me to reconcile that with a man who, according to your daughter, pretended he never had a son.” Maurice leaned forward. “He was already dead to you, right?”

“Maurice, this is too much,” Fiona said. “This feels cruel, and I won’t—”

Maurice didn’t break his gaze. “Answer the question, Kofi. How did you feel when you heard that Kwesi’s invention—your son’s invention—was going to be showcased at the TechXpo?”

Kofi’s jaw clenched. He swallowed once, twice. Then: “I was heartbroken. It—”

“Try again,” Maurice said, folding his arms.

Kofi’s breath came sharp. “Like any father—”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

A pause. A fraction of a second where the truth was dangling on the edge of a knife. And finally, Kofi looked up. First at Fiona. Then at Esi.

His voice dropped like a guillotine.

“I was livid.”

The words detonated in the space between them.

Fiona shot up. Shaking her head.

Maurice’s voice was low, steady, final. “You didn’t go there to sightsee. You went there to see something done.”

Kofi’s silence was damning.

“Justice,” he said.

Maurice nodded once. “Justice was a dead Robert Thorpe.”

The room erupted like a gunshot had gone off in the still air.

“No.” The word barely made it past Fiona’s lips. “No, no.”

She was running away. Maurice moved before thinking, chasing the sound of her heels slapping against the tile.

Fiona tore down the hallway, frantic, wild.

Esi wasn’t far behind, but it was Maurice who reached her first. His hand shot out, fingers grazing fabric, then the sharp rip of a seam giving way.

She spun, a mess of fury and betrayal, and he felt it like a physical thing.

She shook him off, but he pressed in, close, closer, until they were breathing each other’s air. His lips brushed against her temple, desperate for her to be still. For her to hear him. “Tell me you didn’t know, Fiona.” His breath ragged, hot against her skin. “Just look at me and say it.”

She didn’t. She turned instead, eyes seeking Esi like she needed to borrow anger.

“You want to destroy my family,” she whispered, voice tight, unraveling. “That’s what you wanted from the beginning. You never wanted me, you—”

“I only want you.” Maurice cut her off. Fiona was wrong and a liar and probably an accessory to a murder, but if she asked him right now to fuck it all and take her to Mexico, he would google hotels.

Her hands hit his chest, shoving, and he let himself stumble back, let himself feel the space between them crack wide open.

She turned to the door, hand on the knob, ready to flee. Then she stopped short, breath hitching. Maurice followed her gaze.

The guards.

Two thick-necked men in sunglasses, arms folded, blocking the way like sentinels. His men. His order.

“Maurice,” she choked out, something like a plea, something like a curse. “You bastard.”

He swallowed hard, forcing himself to see the fire in her eyes without flinching. Why couldn’t she see it? That he needed her to tell him she hadn’t tricked him. That she hadn’t been playing some long con. That he hadn’t cracked his heart wide open for a dirty lie. He just needed to hear the words.

But she said nothing.

Her silence gutted him.

Maurice exhaled slow. “Sit back down, Fiona.”

She hesitated.

He held her stare. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said.

“We’re trapped here,” Esi said, maliciously tipping over an expensive-looking vase as she sat back down to join their father.

Maurice lunged, catching it and the fluffy peonies mid-fall, water splashing across his forearms.

“I prefer ‘detained,’?” he said evenly, setting the vase upright with a soggy shrug. “Now, I’m going to show you all three pieces of evidence. Now, three pieces of cloth don’t make a quilt, but it sure as hell makes a pattern. And a pattern makes a case.

“Patch one,” Maurice said. He watched Fiona, lips pressed silent. They both knew something was about to crack open, and he couldn’t stop it.

He hit play on the monitor. A grainy feed, monochrome shapes gliding across the corridor. “Can you read the timestamp?” he asked, voice betraying none of the tension ripping through him.

Fiona opened her mouth, but no words came. She shook her head.

“1:02.” His own tone sounded foreign in his ears. “At 1:06, Fiona comes tearing in.” He advanced the footage, felt the half-second warble, then pointed to her figure sprinting on-screen. “Too late,” he murmured.

He rewound the video, and there he was, clear as a yearbook photo: Kofi Addai and the vest in the same frame. “This was the only time the vest could’ve been altered.”

Maurice clicked forward. A new frame: Kofi in perfect, immaculate tailoring. The camera froze on the bulge in his right pocket.