Chapter 3 Update

 The days that followed did not simply continue my misery — they deepened it. The rain became a kind of tyranny, drumming against the windows with a persistence that felt personal, as though the sky itself had taken an interest in my downfall. Indoors, the air felt stale, heavy, and I moved through it like a man half‑awake, half‑drowned.

I replayed everything. Every word. Every face. Every mistake.

Susie’s face surfaced first — always first. That blonde hair, that poised confidence, that faint smile that suggested she knew more than she ever let on. She had drifted through the events like a ghost with purpose. Had Anderson hired her? Had she been working for Roman? Or was she tied to Dave Green in ways I had not yet begun to understand? Her disappearance was too clean, too swift. People don’t vanish like that unless they know how.

Then the diamonds. Anderson’s diamonds. A fortune entrusted to Dave Green — a man who had slipped out of sight with the ease of someone who had rehearsed it. The revelation sat in my chest like a weight. Why diamonds? Why Green? Why Susie? And why, above all, me? I felt like a pawn shoved onto a board mid‑game, expected to play without knowing the rules.

My mind wandered back to the meal — that strange, theatrical dinner in a room that looked stolen from a Tuscan estate. Terracotta tiles glowing under warm lamplight, a wrought‑iron chandelier casting slow, deliberate shadows, a long oak table laid out as though awaiting ambassadors. The tagliata di manzo, the Chianti, the immaculate service — it was all too polished, too controlled. A performance designed to unsettle me with its elegance.

And it worked.

Even now, days later, I could still smell the rosemary, still taste the wine, still see the cheap pay‑as‑you‑go phone Anderson had placed beside my plate — a jarring intrusion into the luxury, a reminder that beneath the civility lay something cold and coercive.

But Susie and the diamonds were not the only mysteries gnawing at me. The woman in her fifties — my supposed client — hovered at the edges of my thoughts like a half‑remembered dream. Who was she? Why had she sought me out? Had she given me her real name? I needed to check my emails, confirm our arrangements, see whether her identity held up under scrutiny.

All of this churned inside me until I felt compelled to step back and reintroduce myself, if only to remind myself who I was before all this began.

My name is Archibald Winterbottom, late thirties, genealogist. I work in a field battered by the internet’s convenience, but I offer what databases cannot — presence, conversation, the human instinct for story. My home is modest, comfortable, inherited from my distant aunt Miss Dorkins, who had taken an inexplicable interest in my future and tied my inheritance to a set of conditions I dutifully fulfilled.

My father, Augustus, lived among furniture and art — Chippendale pieces, gallery visits, craftsmanship over commerce. My mother, Jane, lived among words — typewriters, manuscripts, plays, edits, teaching. I grew up between objects and stories, never quite belonging to either world.

Boarding school taught me rules. University taught me how to bend them. A drunken morning at the army recruitment office taught me what I wasn’t. My parents taught me, in their own quiet ways, that their worlds were not meant for me.

Miss Dorkins taught me what I could be.

A genealogist.

And yet, despite all that, despite the years spent tracing other people’s histories, the greatest question before me now was one I could not answer — one that overshadowed everything else, one that pressed against my thoughts with relentless insistence:

Who is Dave… Dave Green?