“I have to tell you something,” my mom said. Her face was a mask of regret. She was looking at me scared, as if she was about to impart information that would not just anger me but shock me.

“What?”

She shook her head as if she couldn’t bring herself to speak.

The room swirled. Shades of ivory seemed to fuzz in front of my eyes, and for a moment I felt light-headed, as if I might faint. Sam was gone. Forester was gone. My job, probably gone. Could it be that I was about, in one way or another, to lose my mother because she’d done something to Forester?

“What is it?”

“That’s the reason I’ve been pushing you for this big wedding.”

“What’s the reason?” I blinked, trying to clear my head.

“Forester.” She clasped her hands on her lap and gave an embarrassed look. “We hadn’t seen each other for such a long time, and I was using your wedding as an excuse to spend some time with him.”

“Oh.” I shook my head a little to clear it. “Is that it?”

“It’s mortifying, I know. I’m old enough to be past these kinds of things.”

“You’re not old,” I said in a distracted way, because just then something occurred to me. “Wait a minute. So the reason Forester gave me Pickett Enterprises work was because of you?”

My mother didn’t respond immediately.

I laughed, a sparse, harsh laugh. It all made complete sense now. I hadn’t gotten the job as lead attorney because I’d impressed Forester that first day with my hustle or the way I’d spoken to him on the phone. And it wasn’t because I was a good lawyer. It was because my mother used to meet him in a hotel room.

“No, no, no,” my mother said. Then she stopped and seemed to think about it a second. “Well, possibly the first few cases, but Forester adored you, Izzy, adored you. He looked at you as the daughter, the stepdaughter, he almost had. Forester gave you the rest of his cases because he was fed up with Tanner, but more importantly because he thought you were an exceptional attorney and you were going to be even better in the future. He respected you immensely.”

“Don’t flatter me.” My cell phone rang from within my purse, but I ignored it.

“I’m not. That’s absolutely true.”

“True? What’s true? I have no idea anymore!” I found myself almost yelling. I stopped. It was time to ask. “Did you hurt Forester? Did you know he was going to leave money to the Victoria Project?”

“What?” Her blue eyes flashed with hurt. “I loved that man. Right up until the day he died. I would never hurt him.”

“But your charity is going to be fifteen million dollars richer.”

“I don’t need the money-you know that.”

“I don’t know anything anymore!” The words rang out in my mother’s big house, and then we both fell into a silence that sang with such intensity it felt almost preternatural.

We sat staring, and for the first time I saw her as a woman, not my mother, but doing so meant I didn’t know her the way I thought I had. She was someone different altogether.

My cell phone rang again. It stopped and then rang again.

Finally, I turned and grabbed it from my bag. It was a number I didn’t recognize. I stared at the area code. Indianapolis, I realized.

I answered fast. “Izzy,” Alyssa said. “I just wanted to tell you that I got the money and my brother’s credit card back today. They were overnighted by Fed Ex.”

“You’re kidding. What about the passport?”

“He wrote a note that said I’d get that soon. I knew Sam would do what he promised.”

I wished I had the same sense of surety about him. “Was there a return address?”

“No. But I looked on the packaging. It was sent from Panama City, Panama.”

56

I told my mother I had to go. I needed to talk to Mayburn about Alyssa’s call, and more than anything I wanted to tell him about this situation with my mom. I trusted his instincts, plus I couldn’t sit there, looking at my mother, feeling shocked and flattened with all she’d told me.

I left her house, more confused than ever. She seemed to have told me the truth-about loving Forester, about how she would never hurt him. My gut instinct was to believe her, but it also seemed my gut instinct might be severely, severely out of whack.

I called Mayburn when I got to the street. It was chilly outside, the sky turning slate gray with dusk. I looked both ways for someone who might be following me. A hundred feet away an older woman stood with a white poodle that was sniffing around a tree. Two girls walked with coffee cups. Cars drove by slowly on State Street. No sign of the guy with the dark hair, but it could be someone else, someone who wasn’t so obvious, was following me. The unknown aspect of that-of my whole life-made me jumpy.

“You on your way to the Prada party?” Mayburn asked when he answered.

I looked at my watch. Five-fifteen. “Damn.”

“You didn’t forget?”

“No. I mean, maybe I did, just in the last hour.” I groaned. “I’m on my way home now. I’ll change and get there on time.” I’d texted Grady earlier and he was meeting me there.

“What’s up?”

I felt guilty, like I was gossiping about my mom, but Mayburn had told me more than once that he couldn’t help me if he didn’t know everything. And it seemed he was the only one who’d been able to help thus far.

I told him about the bequest to the Victoria Project. And about my mother’s affair with Forester.

He whistled. “Damn. Didn’t see that coming.”

“Yeah. Me neither. What’s your take?”

“It’s another piece of the puzzle.”

I groaned again. “You’re maddening with that puzzle analogy.”

“It’s true. It’s how-”

“Yeah, well, here’s another one.” I told him about Sam’s package from Panama City, sent to Alyssa.

“Now that’s a piece we can do something with. I’ve been watching the brother’s credit card for activity, but we can do a more refined search if we know where the card was used before it was returned. You get to the Prada party, and I’ll get started on this.”

“Right. Okay.”

I reached North Avenue and took a left, heading toward Old Town. Lincoln Park was on my right, and I let my eyes roam the walkways, the park benches, the trees, for signs of anyone standing too still, anyone with a camera or binoculars.

“You okay?” Mayburn said, making me realize I was still holding the phone to my head, almost like a protective shield.

“I guess.”

“Hang in there. We’re getting close.”

I felt an unraveling in my mind. It was getting hard for me to keep all the pieces together and stay sane. “We’d better be.”

At six o’clock I walked into the Prada store. The place was on Oak Street at the corner of Rush, a big money corner. Across the street was Barneys, where you could spend eighty-five dollars on a small votive scented like Himalayan wheat. The remainder of the block was lined with other high-end stores like Hermès and Frette.

I’d been in the Prada store only once before when I’d seen a white pleated skirt in the window, which I thought would be perfect for a firm outing to Arlington Park. When I found that the skirt cost as much as the gross national income of Romania, I promptly spun around, bolted out of the store and never dared look in their windows again.

Inside, the place was small, the walls lined with glass shelves holding shoes and bags. The few clothing racks normally in the center had been moved aside to make way for the party. The guest list, as far as I could tell, was made up of people who could easily afford to purchase Romania. And maybe Bulgaria for good measure. Everyone was coiffed to perfection, including the men, very few of whom had gray hair, even the guys in their sixties. Everyone wore beautiful clothes so crisp and well tailored they looked as if they’d been sewn into them only moments before.