Chapter 18 Saturday, 13 June 2026
Ten minutes later, Hannah and Ami were still tucked away in the Lenox Club’s hidden reading nook, talking. The conversation had migrated from the investigation to Ami’s job as a fashion assistant (occasionally exciting but mostly boring as hell) to her trip to Japan.
The grandfather clock struck two am, then fell silent. A moment later, the door slid open, washing the little room with light. Both women sat up, startled.
‘There you are.’ Edward Beaumont leaned into the nook, scowling.
‘Didn’t know you were looking.’ Hannah stretched out her legs and stood.
‘It’s Ami I need this time, not you.’ He gestured to Ami with a curt jut of his chin. ‘The detectives want to talk.’
Almost imperceptibly, Ami shrank back in her seat.
‘Why?’ Hannah cut in. ‘Ami didn’t have anything to do with all the Madison drama.’
Edward shrugged. ‘I’m just the messenger. Besides, I was at Yale during your final year at Prescott, and they still gave me the third degree.’
Ami gave Hannah’s hand a squeeze. ‘It’s fine. See you soon.’
Hannah watched her little sister stride purposefully out of the reading nook and through the library doors.
Ami would be fine. She could handle herself.
It was a thought she’d had repeatedly since childhood.
Still, she was struck by the same feeling that always followed – that she should have done better to protect her sister somehow.
Inside the Caraway Room, Detective Randall Crews took Ami through the recording consent.
She kept a smile on her face, but her hands were clenched between her knees.
She’d been desperately hoping to avoid a turn in the hot seat, but no such luck.
Of course fucking not. Now that she was here, she needed to be extremely careful.
She’d almost told Hannah the truth down in the library, but she couldn’t draw her sister into this.
Opening up to Hannah would mean putting her sister’s life in danger.
She hadn’t understood what the note had really meant until it was too late.
And now she was the keeper of a terrible secret she’d have to hang onto just a bit longer.
Hannah was desperate to solve Madison’s murder, and shake suspicion off herself, but if Ami told the detectives everything she knew before she had a chance to speak to Madison’s killer herself – an inevitability she’d been putting off all night – she’d be endangering her sister, and herself.
He was powerful – part of one of the most powerful families in all of New York.
An arrest wouldn’t come close to guaranteeing their safety.
She’d learned a bit about power on the Upper East Side during her time at Prescott.
Then Detective Raina Wellesley opened a manila envelope and took out several photo prints. She spread them on the mahogany desk between them.
Ami leaned in to look. Before her were a series of images like apparitions from the past. In them, she was fifteen again, dressed in a silk slip dress, the same baby blue colour she’d chosen to wear tonight.
She’d accessorised with knee-high riding boots and a bulky cream cardigan.
In the first two shots, she was on the deck with Bash, his arm draped over her shoulders, her head listing against his side.
In the other four, she was at the base of the stairs, first sprawled in the snow, her long black hair fanned out around her, then sitting up and clutching her wrist. Hannah was crouched down beside her, and Madison loomed over them both, arms folded across her chest, glowering.
She leaned back in her seat, heart pounding.
Stay cool. She didn’t need to ask where the detectives had gotten hold of the old pictures.
They’d run on Page Six the day after the soft launch at Orchard Page Six loved to spotlight any whiff of scandal surrounding the Upper East’s most influential families.
Ami and Hannah were nobodies; she’d simply been the mystery girl cosying up to Bash, then making a fool out of herself.
No one had cared about Hannah’s role in the whole mess then, and Ami was determined to keep it that way now.
The last thing her sister needed was more negative attention thrown at her tonight.
‘And here?’ Detective Wellesley’s nail tapped against the first two photos in the set, the two in which Ami was leaning into Bash’s side.
‘Exactly what it looks like,’ Ami said, working hard to keep her voice steady. It was so long ago – but the old memories hit harder than she’d expected. ‘I’d been partying too hard, and Bash and I were talking. That’s it.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Nothing happened between us, if that’s what you’re asking,’ she said. ‘Less than five minutes after those pictures were taken, I was making snow angels at the base of the stairs.’
‘And where was Sebastian Beaumont then?’ Detective Crews asked.
She shrugged. ‘I think he came down to check on me, but I don’t really remember. I’d just fallen down a flight of deck stairs, and as I mentioned, I was pretty messed up.’
‘He’s not in any of these pictures,’ he observed.
‘No,’ Ami agreed. ‘I think Madison sent him back to the party.’
The two detectives looked at one another.
‘Madison doesn’t look happy,’ Detective Wellesley said. ‘Was she upset about you and Sebastian?’
‘What? No. Like I said, nothing happened with Bash.’ Jesus, would these two drop it?
‘What about after that night?’ Detective Crews asked. ‘You and Sebastian were at Prescott together for five more months, until the seniors graduated.’
She frowned. The detectives were asking all the wrong questions, but if they kept pressing, they were likely to get dangerously close to the truth.
‘We never got together,’ she said flatly.
Detective Wellesley tapped at the Madison photos again. ‘She’s upset about something here. It looks like she’s upset with you.’
Ami crossed and recrossed her legs. ‘She called me a baby. She thought I was making the Fitzgeralds look bad, which I guess I was, since someone sent photo evidence to a public gossip site.’
Detective Crews tapped a pen against the desk. Tap tap tap. ‘Why do you think the photos were sent to the Post? Didn’t Prescott have its own gossip account?’
Ami straightened, sensing the opportunity to shift the focus of their questioning. ‘You’d have to ask whoever took the pictures. Maybe they thought they could get wider coverage, since they were taken at an exclusive event, not some Prescott party.’
Both detectives stared at her in silence. Ami’s skin crawled. Why weren’t they taking the bait?
‘You should ask Beatrice Whitmore,’ she went on. ‘She was at the top of the stairs, with her phone out.’
An instant stab of guilt. You shouldn’t have dropped Beatrice’s name.
But she didn’t have any reason to think it was Beatrice who had killed Madison, and she needed to do something to send the detectives far away from herself and her high school relationship drama, before they began asking the right questions. The ones Ami was scared to answer.
‘Mmm.’ Detective Crews turned his notebook to a fresh page and scribbled something illegible.
‘Can I go now?’ Ami asked.
Detective Crews switched off the recorder.
One week ago
Ami’s mom, Yoko Hiroto-Miller, had spent a month in Kyoto every summer since her parents returned to Japan twenty years ago. This year, after saving up two years of vacation time, Ami had flown out to join her mother and grandparents.
She’d been in the city for three weeks when the letter arrived.
By postal mail, so old fashioned, but that suited the sensibilities of many of her former classmates – and with no advance warning.
It had sent Ami careening into the past, harder than she’d thought possible.
She’d remained in touch with a good number of students from her class; unlike Hannah, whose time at Prescott had been so brief, Ami had spent most of her high school career haunting its halls.
Her one year of high school in Pittsburgh was a blip; Prescott had consumed her adolescence.
But Hannah’s crowd had largely dropped out of Ami’s life after that first year.
Most were off to college, and the juniors who remained had faded into the background without Madison and Elle around to stir up daily drama.
She hadn’t been planning to attend the gala.
For one thing, most of her close friends from her own class weren’t going.
Jobs in California, Colorado, Washington DC.
Her best friend had settled down in France with a Parisian cyclist last year.
Another woman from their group was doing aid work in the Middle East. It seemed like everyone except Ami had lives too important for Prescott now.
Besides, the gala conflicted with her big Japan trip.
But most of all, the one person she was dying to see – who hadn’t graduated in the same class, meaning they’d never run into one another at reunions, who she’d lost touch with entirely with so much unfinished business between them – hadn’t responded to her drunken, emotionally raw two am text this spring, when the gala invitations had first gone out.
And when he had responded, days later, the reply had been brisk, formal, and vague.
So good to hear from you, Ami! Not sure of my plans yet. I will certainly keep you posted.
The temptation to curl into the foetal position beneath her cubicle at work had been almost overpowering. She hadn’t written back. It was far too embarrassing.
But then, the letter, sent all the way to her grandparents’ home in Kyoto. Handwritten and brimming with the old feelings they’d never had the chance to properly explore – so different from the curt text.
Please come to the gala. If I’m honest, I’m only going for you. Let’s give it another shot – like we should have done ten years ago. I understand why you turned me down back then, but your text this spring… I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
The thing is, we’re all adults now. Madison doesn’t get to control what we do. I won’t let her.
Along with the letter was a ticket to the gala, purchased in Ami’s name, and details for a return flight to New York, pre-paid.
It was an offer too tempting to refuse. But at what cost? Ami knew, deep in her gut, who had killed Madison DuPont. And she’d been avoiding him all night.