Page 40 of The Expat Affair

“Tell me what’s going on with him.”

“With who?”

“Thomas, of course. He’s just been acting so...strange.”

I look up from the menu, curious now.Strange, as in buying thirty-euro necklaces and leaving them on random bikes? That kind of strange?

“Strange how?” I say.

“Moody. Short-tempered and just...off. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this change in him. Roland has seen it. So has Mama. We’re all very worried.”

I put the menu down. Well, that explains the lunch invitation, at least, along with her request I not say anything to Thomas. Thomas has been acting weird. People are worried about him. They sent her here to ask me if he’s okay.

A waiter steps up to the table, but Fleur shoos him away. “He didn’t tell you about all the fights with Xander, did he?”

Fightcould mean a lot of things. An argument. A silly little skirmish. A knock-down, drag-out brawl. It’s a word that can have a million connotations, but I don’t have to ask which one Fleur is referring to, because her right hand curls into a fist.

I try to picture it: reserved, respectable Thomas, trading blows with anyone, much less Xander. The image is so ridiculous that I actually laugh. “Oh, come on. They actuallyhiteach other?”

Fleur nods, her eyes wide and earnest. “Yes. More than once. I’m telling you, those two fought abouteverything. Xander’s designs for a new collection of earrings. A price hike at the lab in China. Thomas’s constant hovering—that’s what Xander called it, hovering and that he needed to back off. One of the polishers had to actually pull them apart.”

“That... doesn’t sound like Thomas at all.”

“Yes it does, Willow. Ever since the Cullinans, my brother has been carrying a lot of pent-up rage, and it doesn’t help that Xander was obsessed with them. He was planning on launching a lab-grown Cullinan collection, did you know that? You shouldhave seen Thomas’s face when he found out Xander was growing matches to the Cullinan stones. He planned to use them as the centerpiece in rings, necklaces, bracelets. Like that bracelet Thomas made for you, but with a Cullinan grown in a lab.”

God’s gemstones, that’s what Thomas called them. He could talk for days about how the Cullinans were formed, how millions of years of heat and pressure deep in the earth rearranged atoms into colorful crystal systems for his great-great-grandfather to brush off and polish. He would have never agreed to a lab-grown Cullinan collection.

“Thomas didn’t mention any of this to me,” I say now to Fleur, and it’s not a lie. It’s Xander who danced around this topic.

I want to lab-grow the shit out of that Cullinan.

Fleur gives me a wide-eyed nod. “Thomas called Xander a thief and a traitor in front of everybody. He fired him on the spot, then had the guards pat him down and escort him off the premises like some kind of criminal.”

Which I happen to know that he was. Whatever stones the killer took from Xander’s apartment, they weren’t exactly on the books, but the Cullinans... Could Thomas be right? Could Xander have really pulled off the heist of the century?

“Thomas is just so volatile,” she says on a sigh. “He has the whole staff walking on eggshells. They’re afraid of saying something that will make him lose his temper.”

Volatile? Steady, serious Thomas?

“He hasn’t been getting much sleep since the Cullinans vanished, but even then. That doesn’t sound like Thomas at all.”

Fleur releases another sigh, a long puff of air that smells like wine and designer perfume. “So you see the change in him, too. Good. I mean, notgood, butyouknow. We’re not crazy to think there’s something wrong.”

“I didn’t say he was volatile, Fleur. I’ve never seen Thomas lose his temper. Like,ever.”

The waiter sidles up to the table for another try.

“We haven’t even looked,” Fleur tells him in testy Dutch. “Come back in another few minutes.”

His bright smile drops off his face. “Of course. My apologies.” He scurries away.

Fleur reaches for her wine. “Does Thomas have a 3D printer at home?”

Her question is so unexpected, the switch of subject so far out of left field, the only thing I can think of to say is, “A what?”

“A 3D printer. Do you have one at home, and if so, what kind?”

I think about all the devices Thomas has lining the cupboards of his study upstairs, the scales and the lights and the microscopes and a bunch of other equipment I have no idea what it’s for. What does a 3D printer even look like? Is it different than a normal printer?

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