Chapter Three

Emily Downing, the destructive ex, answered the door of her apartment on Fifth Avenue with a wide smile. "Well, well, well. If it isn't the good one I let get away."

"You use that line every time you see me."

"It's what always comes to mind. How long has it been, Myron?"

"Three years. Greg's funeral."

Emily knew that, of course. For a moment they just stood there and let the history wash over them. They didn't try to stop it or pretend that it wasn't happening. They'd met in the Perkins Library at Duke University the first month of their freshman year. Emily met Myron's eye and gave him a crooked smile from across the study table. Boom, Myron was a goner. They were both eighteen, both away from home for the first time, both inexperienced in the ways that teenagers pretend they aren't.

They fell in love.

Or at least, he did.

Standing in front of him now, all these years later, Emily said, "You don't really think Greg's alive, do you?"

"Do you?"

She gnawed on her lower lip, and boom again, Myron fell back to those cooling autumn nights in her dorm room, the lights low, the moon in the window over the quad. After almost four years of college dating, Myron broached the subject of marriage toward the end of their senior year.

Emily's response?

She took Myron's hands in hers, looked him straight in the eye, and said, "I'm not sure I love you."

Yet another boom. A very different kind of boom.

"Greg alive," Emily said in amazement. A strand of hair fell across her eye. Myron almost reached out and pushed it away. "It's too weird."

"You think?"

She gave him the crooked smile again. No boom this time. Barely a nostalgic pang. "Still a sarcastic wiseass."

"I gotta be me."

"Don't I know it. But all of it was weird. Starting with you taking on Greg as a client."

"Greg was a solid source of income."

"More sarcasm?"

"No."

"I never understood it," Emily said. "Why did you work with him? And don't tell me it was just about money."

Myron decided to go with the truth. "Greg had hurt me. I had hurt him."

"So you two were even?"

"Let's just say we both wanted to move past it."

"Greg liked you, Myron."

He said nothing.

"It's why I asked you to give the eulogy. I think it's what Greg would have wanted."

Myron and Greg's basketball rivalry started in sixth grade, moved to AAU when they were thirteen, then high school, then the ACC where Myron's Duke battled Greg's UNC. There were rumors of bad blood between the two superstars, but that was just hyperbole. On the court, they both battled with the type of zeal only the hypercompetitive could comprehend. Off the court, they barely knew each other.

Until Emily.

"Did you tell"—Myron took a deep breath—"Jeremy?"

Just saying the name hushed the room.

"I mean about Greg being alive—"

"Don't," she said.

"Don't what?"

"Jeremy's still stationed overseas."

"I know that."

"There's no reason to tell him."

"You don't think he has the right to know that…"—Myron didn't know what term to use so he used the one that Jeremy would have—"… that his father may still be alive?"

"Jeremy's work is dangerous. He needs to focus. It can wait until we know for certain."

Fair point. And really, it wasn't Myron's business. Jeremy had made that clear. This was a distraction and not a good one. Myron kept making the mistake of veering off track. Win had warned him. There was too much history here.

"By the way," Emily continued, knocking him back to the present, "I didn't tell the cops this, but Greg knew Cecelia Callister."

That made Myron pull up. "Wait, what?"

"Not well. He probably met Cecelia two, maybe three times. Back in the day, we used to hang out. Cecelia and I, I mean. We were friends when we summered out in the Hamptons right after we both got married. I know we went out once as couples—me and Greg, Cecelia and her first husband, a nice guy named Ben Staples. Or maybe Ben was her second. I can't remember. Anyway, it was a million years ago."

Myron tried to take this in and see what it meant. "Could they have been more?"

"You mean like lovers?"

"Like anything."

"Greg and Cecelia," Emily mused. "Who knows?"

Myron tried another avenue. "When was the last time you heard from Greg?"

"When he ran off for Cambodia or wherever."

"Laos. That was five years ago."

"Something like that."

"And not a word after that?"

"No," she said softly. "Not a word."

He couldn't tell whether that bothered her or not.

"Look, Myron, Greg and I… it was a strange relationship. We got divorced years ago after, well"—she gestured with her hand in Myron's direction—"you know."

He did.

"But Jeremy was still a sick kid, even after the transplant, and whatever issues Greg had… has?… damn, which is it? Whichever, he loved that boy, even after…"

And there it was.

After Myron's clumsy senior-year proposal, Emily dumped Myron for, you guessed it, Greg Downing. To raise the heartache to the tenth power, she and Greg fell so hard for one another that they got engaged four months later.

That was where it got messy.

Put simply, the night before the wedding, Emily asked Myron to come over. He went. They had sex. The result—though Myron wouldn't know this until some fourteen years later—was a son, Jeremy, who Greg unwittingly raised as his own.

Yep, a mess.

Myron had always blamed Emily. Just as he had started to move on from the pain of losing her, she had been the one to call him that night. She had provided and encouraged the alcohol and made the first move. She had a plan of sorts, destructive as all get-out, and he was just a pawn in it. That was what he'd spent years telling himself. But now, with more distance and objective hindsight, Myron realized that his thinking was old-fashioned. He'd wanted to paint himself the good guy and ultimately the victim. Classic self-rationalization.

Man can justify anything if he puts his mind to it.

"Myron?"

It was Emily. Present-Day Emily. Boy, Win had warned him about letting old trauma back into his life, hadn't he?

"So you two divorced," Myron said, pushing away the past. "But then years later, you got back together, right? You even got remarried."

Emily didn't reply.

"And then, what, Greg just up and ran overseas without explanation?"

"There's more to it."

"I'm all ears, Emily."

She did the lip gnaw again. "I didn't tell the police this. Just so we are clear. I wasn't trying to hide anything. It's not their business. None of this is."

"Okay."

"It's not your business either."

"Okay."

"Greg and I had an arrangement."

Myron waited for her to say more. When she didn't, he asked, "What kind of arrangement?"

"A transactional one."

Most arrangements are, Myron knew, but instead of raising that, he went again with: "Okay."

"Greg was rich."

"Right."

"You know this better than anyone."

"Okay."

"Stop saying okay," she snapped. "Anyway, he promised to take care of me."

"Financially?" Myron asked.

"Yes. It's how I can afford to live here. Greg set up a generous trust for me. For Jeremy too, of course. Win helped him set all that up."

"Seems normal," Myron said.

"It wasn't. I mean, our relationship…" Emily stopped.

"Are you saying you weren't really married?"

"Yes. Well, no. We were legally married. But I mean, what is marriage anyway? Greg spent his life on the road with basketball. That's always been the case. During the off-season, he mostly hung out in South Beach. He only stayed with me when he visited New York, which was, I don't know, maybe a month, six weeks every year."

"And when he did stay, did you two—"

Myron motioned coming together with his hands, accordion style, wondering why he would ask a question like this in the first place. Did it matter?

"We had separate bedrooms," Emily said, "though we sometimes hooked up. You know how it is. We'd go to a fancy dinner party or charity ball. We're all dressed up, we'd have a bit to drink, we'd come home, we'd remember what it used to be like and it's late and it's too hard to find someone else…"

She met Myron's eye. Myron said, "Got it. Go on."

"What else is there?"

"For one thing, why did you want this arrangement?"

"I wanted financial stability."

"And what about Greg?"

Emily turned away from him and headed toward a glass bar cart. "Drink?"

"No, thank you." They were getting to the heart of it now. "Whose idea was this arrangement?"

"Greg's," she said, reaching for a glass with one hand and a bottle of Asbury Park gin. "This part is a little harder to explain."

"Take your time."

"I'm also not sure it's relevant."

"Your ‘dead' husband is being accused of double murder," Myron said. "It's relevant. Why the arrangement, Emily?"

She stared at the bottle, but she didn't pour. "At first, I wasn't sure myself. Greg and I still had Jeremy in common. Even after he grew up and joined the military. Jeremy is so strong and brave and heroic and all that, but he's also… there's something fragile about our son." She turned and stared up at Myron. Our son. That's what she said. Our son. And there were two ways to hear that. Emily started pouring. "Really, Greg and I had no real interest in one another. We were long, long over. But once his anger dissipated, you know from what we did to him…"

Myron felt the squeeze in his chest.

"… there was something else there. I don't know what you'd call it. Friendship isn't really accurate. He and I didn't talk much or have a lot in common. But we had trust. And a bond."

She took a sip. Myron finished the thought for her. "Jeremy."

"Yeah, I guess. Whatever, I'm not telling this right. But one day Greg came to me and said that he wanted us to get remarried. He offered up a generous financial package. I took it."

"And he never explained why?"

"He said something about appearances. He wanted to look committed to one woman and that it would be good for Jeremy."

Myron mulled that over. "Did that make sense to you?"

"No. I figured that Greg had gotten himself in trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"The kind of trouble where it would look good to be married and have a family. I don't know exactly what, but Greg didn't have great impulse control. I thought maybe he'd met an underage girl in some club. Or maybe he screwed someone's wife again. Yeah, ironic, right? Greg was into that. Sleeping with married women. Lot of them. I told my shrink about it. He's sure that Greg's trauma was a byproduct of what we did to him."

Myron stayed quiet.

"No reply?" she asked.

"No," Myron said. "None."

"Anyway, Greg just said he needed to be married. We would go to events together, play the part of the happy couple for the media, the great redemption story, and in exchange he would set up the trusts. I liked that for a lot of reasons. The money obviously. But socially too. Friends don't invite you places when you're single. Especially me. You once told me I gave off a sex vibe."

"Emily, I was young and—"

"Oh, I'm not offended. Jesus. Everyone gets so weird about everything nowadays. I do give off that vibe. I always have. I know it. Anyway, married couples—well, the wives anyway—they don't want that vibe around their husbands. Not when you're a single woman, even though, ugh, zero interest on my part. Anyway, it worked. Greg and I Part Two. He did his thing, I did mine."

Emily's eyes were everywhere but on his. That wasn't like her. Myron said, "You're not telling me something."

"I'm working up to it. It was Greg's private business. I'm not in the mood to drag it out in the open."

"It's not ‘in the open.' You're only telling me."

"That doesn't make it better. You know that, right? But if Greg's dead, what does it matter now? And if he's not dead, if he's somehow alive…" Emily chewed that over for a bit. Myron gave her space. "Let me show you something."

Emily took out her mobile phone, her fingers dancing across the screen.

"As Greg got older, he got weirder. I don't know how else to put it. More reclusive. More online."

"Greg?"

"Yeah, I know. Doesn't sound like him, does it? Anyway, so one day he leaves his phone out on the kitchen counter. He'd been on it nonstop the whole morning and I knew his passcode—he always used the same one for everything. So you can guess what I did."

"Invaded his privacy."

"Exactly. Anyway, I find he's got Instagram. This is so foreign to me. Greg. Can you imagine? Greg has an Instagram account."

"We set it up for him," Myron said. "It helps with endorsement and branding."

"No, not that one. I know about the public one. He never goes on that. Esperanza handles that for you, doesn't she?"

Myron said nothing.

"This is another account. Greg had it under a pseudonym. Here. Take a look."

Emily didn't hand him the phone, so Myron went behind her and looked over her shoulder. Strange how the senses remember better than we do, especially smell. He wondered whether she still used the same shampoo, because for a moment he was back in her freshman dorm, her toweling off after a shower, wearing the raggedy old robe he'd brought from home. It didn't mean anything. It wasn't as though he wanted to act on it. But it was there and inescapable.

The Instagram profile picture had a University of North Carolina tar heel logo. Greg's alma mater. The account's name was UNCHoopsterFan7. UNCHoopsterFan7 followed 390 people—and was followed by twelve.

"It's probably a sock puppet account," Myron said.

"What's that mean?"

"A sort of pseudonym. People pretending they're someone else. Sometimes they do it for marketing. Like they'll be the owner of a restaurant and pretend they're a customer and rave about it. Or political numbnuts who will post ‘Oh I'm super independent' and then they'll defend whatever malfeasance their particular candidate is into."

"That's not what this account is. Greg never posted or commented."

"Okay. So maybe it's just a way to look at other accounts and not have anyone know."

"He was direct messaging with someone, Myron."

Emily tapped with her thumb and brought up an account for a very toned, very muscled, very oiled-up male "Public Figure" and "Fitness Model" named Bo Storm.

Myron's eyes narrowed.

Bo Storm had six thousand followers and followed nine hundred people. Emily glanced at Myron over her shoulder. She wanted to see his reaction. Bo was shirtless in nearly every post in what they used to call beefcake poses. He had a rippling six-pack and the kind of smooth skin that can only come from a serious waxing regimen. His face stubble had been carefully cultivated. His hair was long and frosted. In the top pinned photo, Bo Storm was dancing on what looked to be a nightclub stage in only a thong.

His profile quote read: "Living the rainbow dream in Vegas. Guys, sign up for my OnlyFans account to see more."

Myron had no idea what to make of this.

"How old do you think he is?" Emily asked.

"Twenty-five-ish?"

"Yeah. A lot younger than Greg."

Myron nodded, trying to sort through where Emily was going with this. "So this Bo and Greg were messaging?"

"Yes."

"Did you read the messages?"

"Greg came back into the room, but I saw enough. Heart emojis. Future plans. Intimate stuff."

Myron said nothing.

Emily asked, "Are you surprised?"

"Who cares if I am?"

"I guess it shouldn't matter, should it? I mean, I get it. Or I try to get it. It's a new world, and our generation is still trying to figure it all out. And maybe Greg's constant womanizing was some kind of compensation or outlet or maybe he's bi or pan or omni or I don't know. I really don't."

"It doesn't matter," Myron said.

"Yeah, we can both keep saying that, but it's still a shock, right?"

Myron said nothing.

"And you're right. It doesn't matter. Not in that way. But here's where it gets weirder. Look at the last date this boy—I know this Bo Storm's not a boy, but my God, he's so young—look at the last day he posted."

Myron took the phone from her now and scrolled. The most recent photo was Bo standing on a beach wearing tight bathing trunks and a black tuxedo jacket with no shirt under it. The caption read "Beach Formal for Larry and Craig's Wedding," followed by various emojis of hearts and flames and rainbows.

Myron looked at the date. "He hasn't posted in five years."

"He stopped two weeks before Greg ran off for Asia. And look before that. This Bo guy never went more than two or three days without posting. So, I mean, put it together. Greg is flirting with this young hot guy on Instagram. Suddenly Greg decides to run off. The hot young guy stops posting. So you tell me."

The implication seemed obvious.

"After you read the messages," Myron began, "did you confront Greg?"

"No. At the time… How to put this? I was surprised, sure. And part of me was devastated. But part of me… I loved Greg. I really did. But imagine how hard his life must have been, Myron—hiding who he really was so he could keep his life in sports."

"It's 2024," Myron said.

"Seriously? Tell me—how many male coaches in pro sports have come out?"

Myron nodded. "Fair point. So you figured Greg ran off with this Bo guy?"

"What else would you conclude under the circumstances? Did you really buy the whole monastery-in-Laos stuff?"

"I guess not."

"And in a way, I was happy for him. Greg was never at peace. Not his entire life. There was something always roiling inside of him. I lived with him and knew him better than anyone and yet I always felt that distance. So I let it go. I had the money. I had the perks of marriage, and I was already used to not having him around. It was all okay. Until he died. Jeremy was crushed."

Myron remembered. That had been the last time Myron had seen his biological son—at Greg's funeral crying over the death of his "real" father.

"We're still missing big pieces," Myron said.

"I know."

"Let's say Greg was attracted to Bo. Let's say the two of them ran off together. How do we go from that to Greg, what, faking his own death?"

"I don't know."

"And then, what, he waited a few years and murdered Cecelia Callister and her son?"

"Well," Emily said, "Cecelia was what I thought was his type—beautiful and married. But I don't know what to think anymore. Was Greg gay? Was he into married women? Both? Neither? And now the FBI think he's alive and murdered two people. I can't see it, but people are full of secrets, Myron. You know that."