All Chapters of IF YOU LOVE ME, DIE FOR ME: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Jeremy's POVThe Accountability Project was announced on a Thursday morning, two days after the inquiry finding, which Madeline had chosen deliberately.She had not wanted to launch on the day of the finding, because that day belonged to her father and not to a press announcement. She had not wanted to wait a week, because waiting a week felt like treating the announcement as a separate thing from what had made it possible, when it was not a separate thing at all.Two days was enough time to grieve privately and then stand in front of people and say clearly what came next.We held it at Crawford's office, which was not large enough for the number of people who came, which meant the hallway was full and the stairwell door was open and people were standing on the landing. Calloway was there, not as a journalist for this particular piece but because Madeline had invited him personally, which I thought was the right call. Henry Lau was there, sitting near the back with his hands folded an

POV: MadelineArthur Pryce was a small man with large hands and the kind of stillness that comes not from calm but from twenty years of deciding very carefully how much to move and in which directions.I met him on a Thursday afternoon in a room Donovan's office had arranged, neutral ground, a meeting room in a building that belonged to neither of us, with two cups of tea that neither of us touched.He had asked to meet me. Donovan had passed the request along with the note that it was voluntary and I was under no obligation, and I had said yes without needing to think about it, because some meetings you know you need before you can articulate why.He looked at me for a moment when I sat down."You look like him," he said."People say that," I said."Around the eyes," he said. "And the way you sit. He sat like he was thinking about something else at the same time. You do the same."I did not know what to say to that, so I said nothing."I have wanted to talk to someone connected to hi

POV: MadelineI told Dara first because Dara was nine time zones away and telling her at six in the morning her time felt like the appropriate cost of her knowing before anyone else.She was silent for four seconds, which for Dara was geological."Say something," I said."I am processing," she said. "Give me another two seconds."I gave her two seconds."Good," she said finally. "That is the correct answer. Good.""That is all you have.""I have considerably more," she said, "but I am saving it for a conversation that deserves a better connection than this one. Send me a photograph of the ring."I sent it.Her response came back in six seconds, which was faster than most people read text messages."He chose well," she said. "Simple. Nothing that needs adjusting to. Exactly right.""Yes," I said."Como for the wedding," she said. It was not a question."Como for the wedding.""I will need at least two weeks' notice," she said. "My schedule is not flexible.""You will have six months' n

POV: MadelineThe extradition landed on a Monday in February, which the calendar made grey and the city made cold, and the prosecutor's office made extremely busy.Margaret Soo arrived at Heathrow on a Tuesday morning on a flight from Singapore accompanied by two Interpol officers and a lawyer whose fees, from what Donovan had told me, were structured in a way that suggested Soo had been planning for this moment since before the Singapore arrest and had resources set aside for exactly this that the investigation had not yet located.She was remanded immediately. Her legal team filed four motions in the first six hours, all of them designed to delay proceedings, all of them anticipated by Donovan's office and countered within the day.I was not in court for any of it.I was at Crawford, working through the Harwick cooperation documentation with Sol and Bea and a barrister named Clare who had joined the project the month before and had the particular quality of someone who had spent twe

POV: MadelineWe were married in the afternoon, which was when the light on the lake was doing the thing it did.The ceremony was small because I had wanted it small, the particular smallness of something that belonged to the people in it rather than to an occasion that needed witnessing at scale. Jeremy had not argued, which I had noticed was becoming a quality of his, the ability to understand the difference between wanting something and needing to have it his way.Dara was there, flown in from Singapore the day before, standing beside me with the expression she had been wearing since the Tuesday morning I called her at six, the expression of someone who had known this was coming and was allowing herself to be entirely satisfied about it.Sol was there, and Bea, and Henry Lau, who had flown overnight and looked considerably younger than he had the first time I met him, the particular lightness of a man who had finally set down something very heavy.Mrs. Pak was there, sitting in the