PART 3
His voice came through low and controlled.
“Claire, what the hell does that mean?”
A pause.
“Call me back.”
Another pause.
“You don’t understand what’s happening.”
I almost smiled.
That sentence had always been Julian’s favorite.
You don’t understand.
He used it when I questioned a business expense.
You don’t understand.
He used it when I noticed Chloe texting him after midnight.
You don’t understand.
He used it when I asked why our investment accounts suddenly had less money than they should.
He had built an entire marriage around the assumption that I was incapable of understanding anything important.
Tonight, I decided to let him keep believing that.
I placed the phone face down.
Then I walked downstairs.
The house felt different without him.
For ten years, I had thought of our home as a place of comfort. Tonight, it felt like a crime scene.
The kitchen lights were still on.
One of the mugs sat beside the sink.
Julian had forgotten to take it with him.
I stared at it for several seconds before putting on disposable gloves from the cleaning cabinet.
I photographed everything.
The mug.
The spoon.
The tea box.
The trash can.
The prescription bottle I had already photographed upstairs.
Then I took the mason jar containing the tea I had saved and placed it carefully inside a padded evidence bag.
I had no intention of handling this alone.
Not anymore.
For months, I had been collecting evidence because I was afraid that if I confronted Julian too early, he would destroy everything.
Now I understood something more important.
He was not running because he was guilty of having an affair.
He was running because he believed the theft was complete.
That meant there was a much larger plan.
I walked into my office and locked the door.
The room smelled faintly of cedar and old paper.
My grandfather’s desk sat against the far wall. It had belonged to him before it belonged to my father, and eventually, after my father’s death, it had become mine.
Julian hated this room.
He called it my “little archive.”
He used to joke that I kept too many papers.
Receipts.
Contracts.
Old tax returns.
Property documents.
Insurance records.
Family correspondence.
He never understood that I liked paper because paper remembered things people tried to forget.
I opened the bottom drawer.
Behind several old financial statements was a black folder.
I pulled it out.
On the front, I had written three words.
STERLING FINANCIAL REVIEW.
Inside were copies of bank transfers.
At first, I had believed the missing money amounted to perhaps two hundred thousand dollars.
Then five hundred thousand.
Then nearly one million.
I had stopped calculating once I reached the point where the numbers made me physically sick.
