“Did you know she was here when we moved to Raisin Beach? Is she the reason we came?”

“No!” Graham shook his head vehemently. “You were the one who chose this place. Nice community, safe, all that. And you wanted Matthew to go to that school . . . I had no idea Piper was working there. We lost touch after we split up. I didn’t know what happened to her, and I didn’t care. It was the shock of my life when you showed me the website and I saw she was the director.”

“Nice of you to tell me this before we enrolled Matthew.” Lauren didn’t know whether to believe Graham. She hadn’t seen any shock in him when he’d studied the Silver Swans website. He’d been relaxed, easygoing. Hadn’t he?

“I should have,” he repeated. “But the longer I waited, the bigger of a deal it seemed, the bigger a lie.”

“So have you seen her?”

“I . . . saw her, yeah,” Graham admitted, and this, too, felt like a slap.

“When?”

“The other day. I . . . I went to her office.” He sighed. “She called me. We . . . had a talk. It was weird.”

“And you decided, even after that, that you both would pretend you were strangers?”

“Well, yeah. But, I mean, it wasn’t like we had any chance to be around each other. She was attacked later that same day.” There was something accusing in his voice, something that almost said, You attacked her.

“Why would you keep this from me?”

Graham looked away. “It’s complicated, but it’s in the past. I didn’t love her or anything.”

“You went to Italy with her,” Lauren spat. “You looked in love then.” Graham winced, but that just made Lauren want to press more. “All this time, you were telling me how badly I should feel about my email to Piper, how I shouldn’t have written to her, but you dated her! The police are going to figure that out, Graham. They’re going to ask why you didn’t come forward with this to your own wife.”

“Look, the police know.” Graham sighed heavily. “They’re not idiots.”

Lauren stopped. “They do?”

“Yeah. They found a shared lease agreement from back in the day. They asked me about it that day I went into the station.”

“That day you . . .” Lauren remembered the cacio e pepe dinner. “The day you told stories about all my friends?”

He avoided her gaze. “Uh-huh. They asked me about Piper. I said she and I were on okay terms but pretty much ignored each other.”

Lauren blinked. “And then what?”

Graham shrugged. “They asked why we ignored each other, and I told them Piper and I were both really surprised we lived in the same town. And that she asked me not to bring up the past,” Graham said in a small voice. “So I did. To protect her reputation.”