Page 12 of The Expat Affair

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, thepicture.

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—almostnaked. 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 anipple?

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 thepiece, 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 notthatgood.

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 reachedhow? 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 citiesor 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 alot. 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. Atenth 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 whocan 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?”

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