Chương 2
Predictable was what Trevor called a bridge after he had crossed it.
Naomi put the iPad flat on the island.
Her first impulse was to call him. The thought came with such force that her thumb had already found his name on her phone before she stopped. She imagined demanding an explanation while he sat in the back of the car, speaking softly so the driver would not hear. He would deny what he could, minimize what he could not, and ask why she had been looking at his messages.
She knew the order because Trevor had used it before over smaller lies.
She turned her phone facedown.
A new message appeared.
Trevor: I’m on my way.
Sienna: Miami?
Trevor: Airport first.
Sienna: And when you get here?
Trevor: We have a week.
Sienna: You have a week. I made my decision months ago.
Naomi’s eyes moved to the financial papers she had saved from the coffee.
At the top of the first page was the logo of Hanover Private Bank and a list of transfers from one of their joint investment accounts. She recognized the account’s last four digits. Trevor called it their reserve account. It contained money they did not discuss because discussing it had always seemed unnecessary.
The first transfer was for $4,800.
The next was $3,200.
Then $5,000, $2,500, $4,000 and $3,500.
Twenty-three thousand dollars over eleven weeks, all sent to an account ending in 7719.
The amounts were small by Trevor’s standards. That was what made them unsettling. He did not think in increments of $2,500 unless he was trying not to be noticed.
Naomi searched the message thread for “money.”
Forty-three results appeared.
Her breathing slowed.
Sienna: Did you move the rest?
Trevor: Not yet.
Sienna: You said Friday.
Trevor: I can’t move too much at once.
Sienna: Then do it slowly. But do it before you file.
Trevor: I’m not leaving the marriage with half of everything gone.
Sienna: Neither am I.
Naomi read the last sentence twice.
Neither am I.
Not you. We.
She rose from the stool and walked to the sink. She drank water directly from the glass Trevor disliked because it was from an old mismatched set. He had once suggested throwing those glasses away. Naomi had brought them from her first apartment in Queens, and keeping them had been one of the few arguments she won.
The water tasted metallic.
She carried the iPad into Trevor’s office.
The room looked the way he preferred: nothing personal except a framed magazine cover and an abstract painting selected by a designer. The desk surface was clean. The drawers were not locked because he believed the office door was enough. He had never forbidden Naomi from entering. He had simply made her feel that doing so would be an intrusion.
She opened the top drawer.
Pens, charging cables, two sealed packs of gum and a hotel key card from Chicago.
The second drawer contained client correspondence and a blue folder marked HLS—Q1 Reconciliation.
Inside were invoices from Harrow Lane Strategies, a consulting company Naomi had never heard Trevor mention. The invoices billed his firm, ValeRow Development, for brand research, market positioning and investor communications.
Each amount was just below the level requiring secondary approval.
$48,750.
$49,200.
$47,900.
Naomi had helped organize enough company events to recognize Sienna’s approval initials at the bottom.
SH.
A corporate resolution followed the invoices. It identified Harrow Lane Strategies as a woman-owned outside vendor controlled by Naomi Sinclair Mercer.
Naomi sat down at Trevor’s desk.
Sinclair was her maiden name.
The address beneath her name belonged to a mail center in Delaware. The signature at the bottom resembled hers from a distance. Up close, the N began too sharply, and the final stroke in Mercer slanted upward. Naomi’s real signature always fell at the end because her third-grade teacher had forced her to write on a tilted desk for an entire year.
She had never owned Harrow Lane Strategies.
She photographed every page.
Her hands no longer shook.
The drawer below held a thicker folder with no label. Inside were bank statements, wire confirmations and copies of contracts between ValeRow and three vendors. Harrow Lane was one. The other two shared the same registered agent and the same Delaware address.
Money moved from ValeRow into the vendors, then from the vendors into accounts at Hanover Private Bank. Some ended in 7719.
One wire for $186,000 had funded the purchase deposit on a condominium in Miami Beach.
The buyer was a limited liability company called Caldera Blue Holdings.
Naomi searched the messages.
Sienna: The broker says Caldera needs the second deposit by the fifteenth.
Trevor: It will be there.
Sienna: I don’t want my name anywhere until the divorce is filed.
Trevor: It isn’t.
Sienna: Naomi’s is?
Trevor: Indirectly.
Sienna: That’s dangerous.
Trevor: For who?
There was no answer beneath it.
Naomi stared at Trevor’s question.
For who?
A delivery truck reversed somewhere below, its warning beeps faint through the glass. In the apartment above, a child ran across a floor and was called back by an exhausted voice. Ordinary sounds continued around Naomi as though nothing had changed.
She took a small encrypted storage drive from the back of Trevor’s desk. She had bought it for him after he complained that the company-issued drives were ugly. He had never opened the package.
She copied the folders from the iPad, then photographed the paper files and uploaded the images to a cloud account she had created years earlier for personal documents. Trevor did not know the account existed because it used an email address from before their marriage.
The upload stalled at eighty-seven percent.
Naomi watched the progress circle without blinking.
May you like
At ninety-two percent, the wireless connection dropped.
She laughed once, an ugly sound that surprised her. The penthouse internet system cost more each month than her first car payment, and it had always failed near the kitchen when it rained, when it snowed or when a crisis required it to function.
