"I didn't build this with you," I said, standing up and reaching for my coat. "I built it with a woman whose name you aren't fit to speak."
Ten minutes later, I was in the back of my town car, the dark glass separating me from the blur of Manhattan. The driver, Arthur—a man who had driven Isabelle and me since the day our company went public—looked at me through the rearview mirror. He didn't ask where we were going. He already knew.
We stopped outside a modest brick building on a quiet street in Greenpoint. It was an old industrial loft, far removed from the manicured security of our former estate in Greenwich or the penthouse on Fifth Avenue. The ground floor housed a small textile repair shop, its windows fogged by the cold air.
I got out of the car, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. In my pocket, the envelope felt like a hot iron. I had called her ninety-three times in those first thirty-six hours after finding the seven boxes. I had knocked on this door a dozen times since that afternoon in Soho. She had never answered. But today, through the frosted glass of the second-floor window, I saw a silhouette—slender, focused, bent over a drafting table under the yellow glow of an artist's lamp.
