Page 14 of The Expat Affair

Still, it doesn’t make any sense. If the killer was there for the diamonds, then why murder the guy? It’s not like Xander had diamonds on him in the shower. And what kind of diamond thief carries around a zip tie? This feels like more than a robbery gone wrong.

She leans back in my chair, blowing out a long breath. “Jesus, Rayna. This is some serious shit.”

I nod. The understatement of the century.

I think of Xander on his shower floor, the water washing away the blood and whatever evidence might have been sitting on his skin or under his nails. Is that why they took his finger, because itclawed into the killer’s skin? I think of my DNA lying in a puddle on the floor or in a laboratory somewhere, and my legs grow wobbly all over again. When I let that detective drive me to the station, it was because I was convinced that guiltlessness is on my side. That sometime very soon the cops would find a speck of evidence the killer left behind, a clue that will lead them away from me.

But what if that’s why the killer chose that very moment, when Xander was in the shower, because it was a convenient spot to wash away his DNA? What if the only foreign DNA in Xander’s apartment is mine?

My heart gives a hard kick. “You know how these things work in this country, Ingrid. What would you do if you were me?”

“That’s easy.” She blows out another breath as she pushes up off the chair, pointing at the laptop with the end of a sharp key. “First I’d call a lawyer, and then I’d wipe the internet clean of the picture of you in that necklace. Because if the killer sees you in that necklace, he’ll know he left behind a witness.”

Willow

I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my iPad, deep in a comment thread on X when I find her. The pretty woman who was with Xander when he died, posted to the checkmarked account of someone claiming to be a Dutch journalist.

The Expat Affair: American expat Rayna D. questioned for role in Van der Vos murder & theft, millions of euros in diamonds missing #blooddiamonds #houseofprins #theexpataffair

An American expat, like me. That little tidbit gives me pause, a shiver of kinship with this woman I don’t know and have never met.

Already, the post has racked up a flurry of responses and retweets, dated only seconds ago, and I click to expand the comments. I spot a bunch of screenshots of the same picture, one pilfered from Rayna’s Instagram page, a shot of her seated at the foot end of Xander’s bed, naked but for a collar of yellow and white diamonds and a strategically placed strip of fluffy white duvet. It’s staggering how many people are posting this same picture, how quickly the likes and comments are ticking up, up, upward. It occurs to me then: I’m watching this woman go viral.

The caption reads,Amsterdam looks good on me, don’t you think?W

Brigitte was wrong, though, when she called this woman pretty.Rayna isstunning. Big doe eyes and generous lips. Messy, pillow-mussed curls. I take in the slope of her freckled shoulder, the slice of lean waist, the barely-there peek of a nipple underneath a complicated necklace of marquis and pear-shaped diamonds, 196 of them in total. I know, because it’s a copy of the most iconic House of Prins design.

I wonder if she has any idea of the significance of the piece sitting on her chest, glittering there for all the world to see, if she has an inkling of its value. The centerpiece stone alone is worth more than €100,000—and that’s assuming it’s lab-grown, which I am, because this copy is Xander’s. A flawless, colorless, fourteen-carat pear is not as valuable as the mined version, but still. The necklace is probably worth five times that.

My attention returns to the comments, rolling in faster than I can read them.

If this woman had any brains, she would have broken some things in the house. Roughed herself up some. Given herself a black eye or knocked herself out for a minute or two. At least then her story would be semi believable.

Rayna was there, in the penthouse, when a man was murdered in the shower. And now there are diamonds missing? Of COURSE she has them

WTF!!! SEND HER ASS TO JAIL!

I try to imagine it, tiny little Rayna climbing a naked and soaped-up Xander, managing to hold him still enough to strap a zip tie around his neck and pull it tight so she could make off withthe diamonds. If that’s what happened, then why call the police afterward? Why not scrub the place of evidence and disappear without a trace? No criminal with any sort of brains would upload a photograph putting her in the victim’s apartment the night he was murdered. I don’t know Rayna, but I find it hard to believe she’s that careless.

Also, there’s this: I happen to know that Xander was a difficult sleeper. He told me that once, in the same breath he pointed out all the devices in his bedroom designed around a good night’s sleep. Triple-glazed windows to keep out any street noise. Blackout curtains pulled tight so they don’t let in even a pinprick of light. Air conditioner he sleeps with on high because it fills the room with a frigid wind and a constant, breathy hiss of white noise.

An air conditioner that works on a timer.

I look up from the iPad and into the backyard, going very still as a wind shear rattles the trees. Surely, Rayna knows about the timer. Surely by now she’s realized that whatever death-throe sounds Xander might have made would have been muffled by a wall of solid concrete and the steady static coming from a machine high on the wall, one designed to mask any background noise. Especially if his killer was worried about the people on the floor below and lowered him gently to the floor, it’s conceivable she could have slept through the whole thing. I can’t be the only person with this knowledge.

And yet, what if I am? Then what?

My attention drags to the iPad screen, to the comments rolling in faster than I can scroll.

IDK who this #hobag is, but she is what’s wrong with the world today. Keep your legs closed on the first date, ladies, otherwise karma will come for you.

This girl is pretty, but how old is she? And why do the guys in the diamond industry always go for the barely legal types?

Barely legal.I have to sit with that for a minute. It’s true that I’m younger than Thomas by a whole sixteen years. A big enough age gap that, for many months, I wondered what a forty-four-year-old heir to a diamond fortune could possibly see in me, the uneducated twenty-something waitress who ran away from home when she was sixteen.

Before I came along, though, there were others. Of course there were. Blue-eyed beauties with blond hair and patrician noses, leggy brunettes with thin lips and serious eyes. They were nothing like me, and far better suited for life as a Prins than I am, but they weren’t young. Thomas didn’t have a constant parade of pretty young things he collected in bars and on dating apps like Xander, and they stuck around for a lot longer than just one night. Thomas is very different from Xander in that way. In a lot of ways, actually.

I see what Xander saw in Rayna, though. She’s exactly his type.

---