After His Mistress Framed Me, the DNA Screens Exposed Them

The florist called on a Tuesday, apologizing so much I almost felt bad for her.

"Miss Lawson, I'm so sorry, there was a mix-up. The peonies you ordered for the foundation luncheon—they were delivered to a different address. A Briella Lawson signed for them."

I didn't raise my voice. "Same order number?"

"Yes, ma'am. I don't know how that happened."

I did. I thanked her and hung up, and I wrote it down in the notes app on my phone, under a folder labeled *Household Repairs*. Nobody would think to look there. Date, time, what was taken. Small things. I was building something, though I didn't have a name for it yet.

Three days later, Briella wore my dress.

Not a similar dress. Mine. The blush Carolina Herrera I'd picked out for the Whitfield Gala, the one I'd shown a photo of to exactly two people—my stylist, and Briella, because she'd asked, sweetly, if she could see it, since we always used to compare notes on what we'd wear so we wouldn't clash. I walked into the ballroom and there she was in it, laughing at something a senator's wife said, one hand resting on her stomach like she was cradling the punchline.

Heads turned toward me, then toward her, then back. Someone tittered behind a champagne flute.

I smiled at the room like it was any other night. I found my seat. I did not touch my glass.

Afterward, in the ladies' room, I heard two women I didn't recognize talking low by the sinks.

"Poor Estelle. Briella says she's been struggling. Emotionally, you know. Since the accident."

"Which accident?"

"The one at the estate. Briella's very worried about her. Says she might need space. Some time away."

I ran the water a little longer than I needed to, dried my hands, and walked out past them without a word. In the car, I added it to the list. *Struggling emotionally. Might need space.* Briella was laying groundwork. She wasn't just stealing my dresses and my flowers. She was pre-writing the story of what would happen to me when the truth came out—unstable, unreliable, not to be believed. I almost admired the architecture of it.

I didn't feel any of it the way I would have three months ago. It landed somewhere flat and far away, like weather reported from another city. I just kept the ledger.

---

Massimo's office was in Red Hook, in a building that still had the ghost of some old factory's name pressed into the brick above the door. No sign. No buzzer with his name on it. I texted when I arrived and the door unlocked itself.

Inside, it wasn't what I expected. No leather chairs, no skyline view. Just steel shelving, rows of it, and boxes labeled in block handwriting. One wall was different—cork, floor to ceiling, papered with photographs and timelines connected by red string like something out of a film. In the center of it, a single folder, thicker than the rest, with a crest embossed on the tab. The Meyer crest.

"You keep a war room," I said.

"I keep a case." He pulled a chair out for me, then sat across the table, not beside me. He always kept a table between us. I noticed that. "Sit. You should see all of it before the gala. Not pieces. All of it."

He walked me through the surveillance stills first—Briella, over four separate months, entering a private wing of the Meyer estate at hours no visitor should. Then the timestamps, cross-referenced with the patriarch's household staff schedule, the nights his valet was given the evening off. Then transcripts. Messages between Briella and Bertrand Meyer, sent from a second phone registered to a shell company Massimo had traced back to her.

*You said you'd take care of it. I can't keep doing this alone.*

*Patience. Everything I have will be his. And yours.*

I read every page. My hands didn't shake. I noticed that, distantly, the way you notice you've stopped shivering in cold water because your body has simply decided cold is the new normal.

When I finished, I set the folder down evenly, corners aligned.

"Why?" I asked. "Why have you spent years on this? On them?"

Massimo didn't look away. He never looked away, I was learning. "The Meyer family owes me a debt," he said. "That's all you need to know right now."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have for tonight."

I let it sit. I didn't push, though I wanted to. There was something underneath his voice when he said *debt*—not heat, not anger, something older and colder, banked down so long it had turned to stone. I recognized it. I was building the same thing in myself.

"Three weeks," I said instead, closing the folder.

"Three weeks," he agreed, and for the first time, something that wasn't quite a smile moved at the corner of his mouth. "Try on something you'd want to be photographed in when it happens. It's going to be the last photograph of Estelle Lawson anyone takes as a victim."

I didn't answer him. But driving home that night, I stopped at a boutique I hadn't been inside in three years, and I bought a dress the color of dried blood, and I didn't think about Dylan once.