He nodded solemnly. “My dad… wanted to say… sorry. About everything.” Ridley’s voice was unsteady, as if reciting a half-learned speech. His eyes were as green as his father’s, but they couldn’t meet mine directly, darting instead to the tombstones around me.

“Oh.” I was stunned that Martin had sent Ridley to speak for him. I’d read in a newspaper that Martin Sklar had fallen and knocked out four teeth. Only he and I knew what had really happened. And Ridley, of course.

“Is that all?” Tariq snapped. Even as a whisper, his voice was harsh.

Ridley flinched as if he’d been struck. “My dad wanted… here, take this.” Ridley thrust a small black velvet drawstring bag at me and fled. I watched him lose his footing, fall into a headstone, and get up again. He vanished from view as he rounded the chapel.

I untied the bag. Inside was the silver bangle from my father. Rolling it around in my hands, I felt lighter, almost giddy, for a moment. For Lily, With Love Always, Dad. “I can’t believe it.”

“How the devil did he get his hands on that? He must have stolen it from Claudia’s flat.” Fury simmered under Tariq’s words.

“No, I found it at Claudia’s and then I lost it. He’s just returning it to me.” I snapped it around the wrist of my glove, heartening slightly at the reassuring click. “I couldn’t believe she’d had it all this time.”

“What do you mean? I only brought it to her in December.”

“What?”

“Claudia had sold it some time ago for… well, she had sold it, and she went to great lengths to retrieve it. When I had dinner with her in August, she was determined to locate it. She could not even remember to which pawnbroker she had taken it, but her guilt at taking it haunted her. I thought it would impress her if I were able to do it. Of course, I was out of the country a good part of the time, so I had several people working on it.”

I stared at him, speechless. Claudia hadn’t been hiding it from me all this time. She had sold it for drugs, as I’d originally feared.

“When I visited Claudia’s in the middle of December, it was because I had managed to retrieve it,” Tariq whispered. “I gave it to the woman who answered the door. When I did not hear from Claudia, I knew that something was terribly wrong. Claudia would have sold her soul to get that back for you.”