The murderer is still on this train.

  She went to bed at eleven. Lay there until one, watching shadows move across the velvet canopy. The rhythm of the tracks should have been soothing. It wasn't.

  At one-fifteen, she gave up and put on the robe again. At this point, she'd worn it more than anything else she'd brought.

  The corridor was empty. Dimmed for night, the brass fixtures turned down to a soft glow that made everything look like a photograph of itself. Her slippers made no sound on the carpet. The train swayed gently, and she swayed with it, one hand trailing along the wall for balance.

  The library car was two carriages down. She'd grab a book, find somewhere quiet to read, and maybe by the time she finished a chapter her brain would finally agree to be quiet.

  The selection was smaller than she remembered. Someone had taken the Hemingway. The Christie was back on the shelf—she wasn't touching that one again. She could still feel Senn's eyes on her, that first morning, holding Murder on the Orient Express like a confession.

  She settled on an Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence. Safe. No murders. No trains. Just repressed aristocrats making each other miserable in drawing rooms. That seemed about right.

  The observation car would be empty at this hour. She could curl up by the window, watch the mountains in the dark, pretend she was the kind of person who read Wharton for pleasure instead of the kind of person who couldn't stop hearing a man say the murderer is still on this train.

  Richard was there.

  He sat alone by the window, a glass of something amber on the small table beside him. No book. No papers. Just him and the darkness outside and whatever he was thinking about.

  He looked up when she came in. Didn't seem surprised. Didn't seem anything, really. Just looked at her the way you look at someone when you've already made peace with being interrupted.

  "Couldn't sleep either?"

  "Apparently not." She hesitated in the doorway. "I can go. If you want to be alone."

  "I've had three hours of alone. Sit."

  She sat. The chair was velvet, of course, cold at first, then warm. Through the window, the Alps were putting on a show. Peaks catching moonlight. Valleys pooling with shadow. The kind of view you were supposed to photograph, except she'd left her phone in the cabin, and anyway, some things you couldn't capture. You just had to look at them and know you'd never quite remember how it felt.

  "Danny finally asleep?" she asked.

  "No, but he hovers." Richard picked up his glass, didn't drink from it. "He thinks I don't notice. I notice."

  "He worries about you."

  "He does. More than he should." Richard turned the glass in his hand. "It's a strange thing, being watched that closely. You feel the weight of their fear. Every meal becomes a negotiation. Every cough, a potential crisis. After a while, you start pretending you feel better than you do, just to give them a rest."

  "That sounds lonely."

  "It is." He said it simply. Not complaining. Just saying. "The loneliest part of dying isn't the dying. It's pretending you're not."

  Iris felt that land in her chest, like something folding in on itself.

  The word sat there between them. Dying. He'd said it the way you'd say Tuesday or rain. Like it was just a fact. Like facts were all any of us had.

  She'd had him wrong from the beginning, she realized.

  She'd met him at tea that first day and filed him under family saga patriarch. Silver hair, kind eyes, the watch that stayed in families. The type whose role was to dispense wisdom and die at the act break, setting the inheritance plot in motion. Important to everyone else's story. Never quite the point of his own.

  She hadn't understood that he was the protagonist of his own story. One that was ending.

  Sitting here now, watching him turn an empty glass in his hands, she couldn't find a genre for him at all. Just a man at the end of something, trying to make sure it meant something.

  "Richard—"

  "My heart." He touched his chest, lightly. "Same thing that took Eleanor. The irony isn't lost on me. She spent forty years as a cardiologist, telling other people how to take care of their hearts, and then hers just—stopped. Now mine's doing the same thing. The doctors gave me months. Maybe a year if I'm careful. Which—" A short laugh. "I've never been careful about anything."

  She didn't reach for the usual words. I'm sorry. That's terrible. Is there anything I can do. They felt too small.

  “Danny doesn't want me to talk about it," Richard continued. "He thinks if we don't say it, it won't be real. But it's real. It's been real since the diagnosis. And I refuse to spend whatever time I have left pretending otherwise."

  "How long have you known?"

  "Long enough to stop being angry. Long enough to start thinking about what happens after."

  After. Such a small word for such a big thing.

  "The foundation," she said.

  "Part of it." He set down his glass. "I've had a successful life, Iris. By any measure that matters to the world. Money. Influence. The right people at the right parties saying the right things about me." He paused. "And now I'm seventy-four years old, sitting on a train in the middle of the night, wondering if any of it mattered."

  "Did it?"

  "Some of it. The work that actually helped people. The relationships that were actually real."

  He was quiet for a moment.

  "Do you know what I regret?"

  She shook her head.

  "Not the failures. Not the deals that fell through or the money I lost. I regret the things I postponed." He leaned back in his chair. "Eleanor and I talked about spending a summer in Tuscany. Really being there. Not a vacation, but a life. Cooking, walking, learning how the days moved in a place like that." He smiled, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "We never went. There was always a reason. Work, money, timing. And then Eleanor was gone, and I was sixty-seven, and we'd never had that summer."

  “You can still go. With Danny. There's still time."

  "There's always still time, until there isn't." He shifted to face her more fully. "I built things my whole life. Companies, portfolios, a reputation. All of it pointed toward some future version of myself who would finally get to enjoy it. And now—" He gestured vaguely at himself, at the train, at the night outside. "Here I am. In the future. And I'm not sure that man ever showed up."

  Outside, a light appeared briefly. A village, maybe. Someone else's life, glimpsed and gone.

  "I spent my savings on this trip," Iris said. She hadn't planned to say it. "Forty-eight thousand dollars. Everything I had."

  Richard's eyebrow went up.

  "I know. It's insane. I've never done anything impractical in my entire life." She pulled the robe tighter. "And then I turned fifty. And I found this journal I'd kept as a teenager. And I realized I'd spent thirty years waiting to become the kind of person who takes the Orient Express." She stopped. "I couldn't wait anymore."

  "Good."

  "Good?"

  "Good." He said it with conviction. "That's exactly right."

  "Most people think I'm having a breakdown."

  "Most people are having a breakdown. They're just doing it slowly, over decades, while telling themselves they're being responsible." He picked up his glass again. "You know what I've figured out, sitting here in the dark, thinking about everything I didn't do?"

  "What?"

  "People spend their whole lives chasing. Careers. Houses. The right title, the right car, the right relationship. They think if they just get one more thing, they’ll finally arrive.”

  "And they don't?"

  "Some do. For a while."

  He took a sip. Set the glass down.

  "But most of them wake up old and realize they were so busy becoming someone that they forgot to be anyone."

  The train swayed. Ice shifted in his glass.

  “After Eleanor died, people kept telling me I'd find someone else. That I shouldn't be alone." He shook his head slowly. "But Eleanor was never what made me whole. That's not why I loved her. I loved her because we were both already whole. We chose each other. Every day, for thirty-seven years, we chose each other."

  He was quiet for a moment. “Everyone gets it backwards."

  "Gets what backwards?"

  Richard looked at her. In the dim light, with the mountains behind him and the train moving beneath them and all the noise of the last few days finally gone quiet, he looked like what he was. A man near the end of something, trying to say something true.

  "The biggest love affair of your life should be with yourself. With this life. With living it."

  The words settled into the silence.

  Part of her wanted to resist. It sounded like something you'd find on a bookmark in a gift shop, or cross-stitched on a pillow. The kind of wisdom that was easy to say and impossible to do.

  But Richard wasn't selling anything. He was just sitting in an observation car at two in the morning, telling her what he'd figured out too late.

  "Not selfish," he continued. "Not self-indulgence dressed up in better language. I mean actually knowing yourself. What makes you feel alive. What you're curious about. What terrifies you and thrills you and makes you feel like you're actually here. Present. Participating."

  "I bought things," she said quietly. "For years. Things for the person I wanted to become. A yoga mat still in plastic. Italian flashcards I never got past 'grazie.' A pasta maker that's never seen pasta." She pulled the robe tighter. "I kept them in a closet. Like promises of someone I was planning to be."

  "But you're here."

  "I'm here."

  Richard didn't say anything else. He didn't need to. The train kept moving, and outside the mountains kept passing, and she sat with the strange weight of it — thirty years of things she'd never used, and then one thing she had.

  Maybe that was the whole difference. Between buying and using. Between someday and now.

  They sat with that for a while. The train rocked gently. The mountains kept passing, patient and enormous and unconcerned.

  "The foundation," Iris said finally. "You said it was part of what comes after."

  "My entire estate. Medical research. Early detection. The things that might have saved Eleanor." He said it calmly, like he was discussing the weather. "Danny's been helping me arrange it all. He believes in it as much as I do.”

  “That's generous. Giving everything away."

  "It's practical. I can't take it with me. And I'd rather it become something useful than sit in accounts while lawyers argue." He paused. "The lawyers have everything ready. I sign the final documents when we reach Istanbul."

  He finished his drink. "It's not giving it away, really. It's turning it into something. Something that matters.”

  The sky outside was still dark, but different now. Softer at the edges. Not dawn yet, but the idea of it.

  "I should let you rest," Iris said. "If you can."

  "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

  He caught her wince.

  "Sorry. Danny hates that joke too."

  She stood. At the door, she turned back.

  "Richard. For what it's worth. I'm glad you're on this train."

  "For what it's worth," he said, "I'm glad you spent your savings."

  The corridor was still quiet. Still dimmed. She walked back to her cabin slowly, one hand on the wall, feeling the train move beneath her.

  Fifty years old. And for the first time in longer than she could remember, she was curious about what came next.

  Not anxious. Not braced. Just curious.

  That felt new.

  Her cabin door opened quietly. She turned on the small lamp by the desk. Found her journal. Opened to a fresh page.

  For a moment she just sat there, pen hovering. Then she wrote:

  The biggest love affair of your life should be with yourself. With this life. With living it.

  Richard's words, in her handwriting now. Hers to keep.

  She looked at the sentence. Felt slightly ridiculous.

  She didn't cross it out.

  Outside her window, the mountains were silver with moonlight. The train kept moving. Istanbul somewhere ahead, getting closer with every passing mile.

  She closed the journal. Set down the pen.

  Sleep still felt far away.

  For once, she could live with that.

  19

  The lounge car that afternoon was full of people pretending to relax. Iris recognized the performance. She had done it herself often enough. Bodies arranged in comfortable positions, books held at the right angle, faces composed into expressions of leisure. But no one was actually reading. No one was actually calm. They were all just waiting for the next thing to happen and hoping it wouldn't.

  Iris had claimed a chair in the corner with the Wharton she still hadn't managed to finish. Newland Archer was about to make a terrible decision. He'd been about to make it for forty pages now. She kept reading the same paragraph, waiting for him to do it, not quite able to care.

  The elderly couple from car three had taken the settee nearest the window. They sat the way couples sat after fifty years of marriage. Close but not touching, each absorbed in their own activity, occasionally murmuring something the other didn't need to respond to. He had a newspaper. She had knitting. Neither seemed to be making progress. Every few minutes he'd turn a page he couldn't possibly have finished, and she'd count her stitches and frown and count them again.

  Outside the windows, the Alps had finally decided to show themselves. After days of fog and murder and sitting still, the train was moving and the sky was clear and the mountains were doing that thing mountains did—looking permanent and ancient, as if nothing that happened in this train would even register. Iris found this oddly comforting. The Orient Express had seen a hundred years of scandals. The Alps had seen a hundred million. Perspective was useful.

  Mrs. Winslow had claimed the largest settee and was doing what Mrs. Winslow did best: talking. The elderly couple had made the mistake of commenting on the view, and now they were trapped, nodding politely while she explained the principles of alpine horticulture.

  "—of course, the borders are everything. Herbert always said a garden without structure was just weeds with ambition⁠—"

  Herbert. Everything circled back to Herbert. Herbert's theories on soil. Herbert's opinions on pruning. Herbert's firm beliefs about the proper height of delphiniums, which apparently was a thing one could have firm beliefs about.

  The elderly woman's knitting needles clicked steadily. Her husband turned another page of his newspaper.

  Iris turned a page she hadn't read.

  "—and of course you have to plan in autumn if you want spring color. That's the secret nobody tells you. By the time you're thinking about gardens, it's already too late to have one⁠—"

  There was something soothing about Mrs. Winslow's voice, Iris decided. Not the content—she couldn't care less about perennial borders—but the rhythm of it. The steady stream of certainty. Mrs. Winslow knew exactly what she thought about gardens and husbands and the proper way to arrange a foyer, and she was going to share all of it whether you wanted her to or not.

  It was restful, in its way. Like listening to a radio in another room.

  "—and the soil, of course. People never think about soil. They think you just dig a hole and put a plant in it and hope for the best. But Herbert always said soil was everything. You wouldn't build a house on a bad foundation, would you? Same principle⁠—"

  Iris let the words wash over her. The train rocked gently. The mountains scrolled past. Newland Archer continued to teeter on the edge of his terrible decision.

  She wondered what Robin was doing right now. Probably in the greenhouse, talking to her seedlings. Robin talked to plants the way other people talked to pets. Running commentary, gentle encouragement, occasional stern warnings about root rot. Iris had always found it charming. Now she found herself missing it with an intensity that surprised her.

  She should have called Robin last night, after the conversation with Richard. Should have told her about the foundation, the confession, the strange intimacy of sitting in the dark with a dying man.

  The biggest love affair of your life should be with yourself.

  She'd written it down. It felt important. It still felt important.

  "—the height in the back, of course, then you fill around it. Texture and color and form, all working together. Herbert used to say the right arrangement makes all the difference⁠—"

  The word landed.

  She'd heard it before. Mrs. Winslow had used it days ago, and something had snagged then too. But Iris had been too overwhelmed to follow the thread. The investigation. Senn's questions. Her own name on a suspect list.

  Now the thread pulled taut.

  Like a lock turning. Like the moment when you'd been staring at something for hours and suddenly saw what had been there all along.

  Arrangement.

  Not a scheme. Not a con. Not Theo and Victoria plotting in corridors.

  A flower arrangement.

  The flowers in her cabin. The ones meant for Richard Hartwell, delivered to the wrong room. Danny in the corridor at 2:45 a.m.—here you are—helping Elena with something. She'd assumed glasses. But what if it was flowers? What if he was getting rid of them?

  And the champagne toast. Danny at the tray with his surgeon's hands. Danny placing Richard's glass. Victoria grabbing the nearest one in a fury⁠—

  Richard's glass.

  Iris's hands went cold.

  She didn't have proof. She had a feeling—the kind of feeling that woke you at 3am, certain you'd left the stove on. The kind you couldn't explain but couldn't ignore.

  She needed to know what those flowers were.

  What had they looked like?

  She closed her eyes. Tried to reach back through everything that had happened. The murder, the investigation, the handkerchief, Senn's questions, Theo's arrest. Layer after layer of crisis, burying that first day under an avalanche of everything that came after.

  The platform at Victoria Station. The porter with her luggage. The corridor that smelled like furniture polish and money. Her hand on the brass door handle, not quite believing she was allowed to open it.