You believe that? Dude can strip naked in front of a crowd of thirty thousand people and make himself bleed onstage but doesn’t have the balls to break up with me in person. I won’t lie. I was devastated. I stopped showering, just threw on sweatpants and put my hair in a gross, greasy bun whenever I had to leave the bungalow I rented in Santa Monica, which I tried to do as little as possible. I stayed inside bingeing on other true-crime documentaries. It was like a cleansing. I wanted to get the image of JB out of my head and figured the best way to do that was to fill it with images of other horrendous crimes. It sounds weird, I know. But, like I said, I was pretty wrecked. Not much from that time makes sense.

When I wasn’t watching Investigation Discovery or 48 Hours or Dateline, I was blowing through every Netflix series and HBO doc I could find. My absolute favorite show was Power, Privilege and Justice. It had run for nine seasons through most of the 2000s, and now truTV showed reruns. It was hosted by this dandyish-looking Vanity Fair writer named Dominick Dunne and covered a lot of famous cases, like the Menendez brothers and Andrew Cunanan. But there were also really obscure ones I never heard of before.

That’s how I first came across Claudine Longet. And that’s how I eventually wound up in Aspen with a different Claudine. My Claudine.

And Henry. Poor, poor Henry.

Henry

It had been three weeks since the hospital. He wasn’t feeling any better.

Turning off the shower, he wrapped a towel around his waist and, with a swipe of his fist, cleared enough fog from the mirror to see his reflection. His salt-and-pepper hair was slicked back, damp. He hadn’t been sleeping well. The dark circles under his eyes looked like bruises. Claudine wasn’t happy about that. She’d left a tube of her concealer out on the counter of the double vanity. He squeezed a dime-sized amount onto the back of his hand and dabbed it on.

She brought her outfit for the party to the office, efficient to the core, but he decided to go home to change. He hoped a midday shower would give him energy, increase his focus. It didn’t. It just made him wet.

Why was she making him go through this again?

Their unspoken pact that had lasted over twenty years, broken without so much as a conversation.