I moved closer to him. “She wanted your help, but she didn’t want you,” I said. “You thought you’d be together, but to Caro you were just the means to an end.” It hurt to talk about my sister like that—as if she was willing to do wrong if she thought she had a reason to—but I had to admit the truth of it. The Thraxtons were up to their eyeballs in illicit money, and Caro had been okay with that as long as she could support a worthy cause.

“You don’t know that. Caroline made a terrible mistake when she left me. This was our second chance.”

“I understand why you want to think that, but you’re delusional,” I said. “All Caro was thinking about was Teddy. This wasn’t a romantic plan to run away, Ben. You know that.”

I’d expected him to shout at me, but he got quieter. “She only backed out of it because she panicked.”

“Backed out of it?”

“I told you already—she freaked out that morning when Theo showed up. She told me she was leaving with Teddy as soon as she picked up their passports.”

“She told you that the morning she died?”

Ben wiped his face and nodded. “She was upset about Theo. She knew he’d been spying on her. She was genuinely afraid of him.”

I felt like a ton of bricks had dropped on me. I’d believed Ben when he’d told me he hadn’t seen Caro that morning. His story made sense, because she hadn’t given him the memory card she was carrying. It had never occurred to me that they had met up that morning.

“It never made sense to me, how Caro came down to your neighborhood but didn’t give you the memory card,” I said, thinking out loud. “I thought maybe someone followed her and stopped her. I blamed Theo, then his father. But it wasn’t them. It was you.”

“Can you hear yourself talk?” Ben said. “Because you sound crazy.”

“You were supposed to come up to Caro’s neighborhood. Then Theo showed up, and she came down to yours. You said she never showed up at your building. But this was all supposed to be on the down low. You were meeting her in the park, where there weren’t any cameras.” That was one of the last scenes on the video the police had, my sister walking out of the park, clutching her head and her chest. It was clear something was terribly wrong. Only it was worse than I’d thought.

“What happened when you saw her, Ben?”

“She told me she was taking off.” His voice was low and flat, as if our conversation had hammered him down. “I said I wasn’t ready, and she said . . . she said it was just her and the kid.”

“What happened then?”