All Chapters of THE BILLIONAIRE MARRIED HIS BROTHERS' KILLER : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Simon — The Shape of a LieHe told Reeves to stand down on the personal investigation.He did this at seven in the morning, before Mara was awake, standing at the window of his study with his coffee cooling in his hand. Reeves received the instruction with the professional neutrality of a man paid not to have opinions and said he would close that particular line of inquiry and did Simon want him to continue with the broader background work.Simon said yes.He said it without hesitation, which told him something about himself that he was not entirely comfortable with. He had believed her — he had sat across from her in the study and listened to her account of the name change and the relationship and the careful, considered explanation for the gaps in her history, and he had believed her, and his believing her had not stopped him from instructing Reeves to keep looking.He turned this fact over in his mind while he waited for the coffee to reach a temperature worth drinking.He believed

Simon — WatchingThe driver's name was Marcus. He had worked for Simon for six years and he had the specific, invaluable quality of a person who observed without being asked to and reported without embellishing.He had called Simon at four fifteen on Friday afternoon."Mrs. Brown met someone at a coffee shop on Bellagio. Male, sixties, silver hair. They spoke for approximately twelve minutes. She left first. He remained for another four minutes then left on foot heading north."Simon had written down the description and said thank you and hung up and sat at his desk and looked at the wall for three minutes before picking up the phone again.He had not told Reeves about the meeting yet. He had not told anyone. He had sat with it through dinner and through the quiet after dinner when she had looked at him across the table with that steady, unreadable gaze and he had asked about her afternoon in the most ordinary voice he could produce and she had said coffee and he had nodded and stored

Both — The AlmostThe rain came back on Tuesday.Not the apologetic rain of October, thin and gone by noon — this was November rain, the kind that settled in over the hills and stayed, turning the estate grounds dark and the windows silver and the rooms inside smaller and warmer than they were on dry days. The house had a different quality in rain. Closer. The sounds didn't travel the same way. The corridors felt shorter.Mara spent the morning doing what she always did — moving through the house, maintaining the rhythms that had become, in four months, entirely natural to her. She had stopped being aware of performing the role of household staff. She simply inhabited it, the way she had learned to inhabit everything Hayes had put her inside of. The difference was that what she inhabited now was real in ways she had not built and could not fully control.Simon was working from home. The rain, or something else, had kept him in the estate rather than the downtown office, and she was pe

Simon — The DiscrepancyThe discrepancy was in the timing.He had found it at one in the morning, in the particular focused state he reached when he had been working long enough that the noise of his own thinking had gone quiet and what remained was just the thing itself, the problem without its surround. He had been going through the Reeves files — all of them, from the beginning, the preliminary report through the Carol Simmons finding — and the thing that had been bothering him, the thing he had filed and returned to and filed again, finally surfaced.Mara Cole's application to the domestic agency had been submitted fourteen months ago.The agency had been established fourteen months ago.Not fourteen months before her application. Fourteen months before the application, the agency had been founded — which meant the agency and the application were effectively simultaneous. Which meant Mara had not found the agency and applied. The agency had been created in preparation for her appl

Both — The Last NightHe came upstairs at seven fifteen.She was in the sitting room — the shared one, the room between their bedrooms that belonged to both of them and therefore fully to neither — in the chair by the window with her hands folded in her lap. The lamp was on. The room was amber. Outside the last of the November light was going out over the hills.He stopped in the doorway.She looked at him. He looked at her.He came in and sat in the chair across from her — the same configuration as always, the two of them on opposite sides of the sitting room, the arrangement they had arrived at without negotiating it in the first week of the marriage — and he looked at her with an expression she had learned to read over four months of learning him.It was the expression he wore when he already knew something and was waiting to see if she was going to tell him."The envelope on your desk," he said.She nodded. "Read it after. Not now.""Why not now.""Because I want to tell you mysel