Chương 7
Nothing came through the speaker except his breathing.
I had not asked that question before.
Neither, apparently, had he.
“You saw me that morning,” I said.
“I remember.”
“You ate breakfast across from me.”
“Yes.”
“I told you I was staying home because I felt nauseated.”
His voice dropped.
“I remember.”
“You came back shortly before noon because you forgot the presentation folder for your meeting.”
“Yes.”
“You found me on the couch.”
“Yes.”
“Selina arrived less than an hour later.”
“Mabel.”
“You knew I was home.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“No.”
My throat tightened.
“You were thinking.”
He began to cry.
I heard it in the way he tried not to inhale.
“She said you followed her.”
“And you needed that to be true.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Why would I need that?”
“Because if she was lying, then you had to choose between believing her and believing your wife.”
“Mabel, please.”
“And you had already made that choice years ago.”
I ended the call.
My hand shook afterward.
Nora took the tablet from me and placed it facedown.
For a while, she said nothing.
A nurse came in to check my blood pressure, complained that hospital coffee should be classified as an industrial solvent, adjusted my IV, and left.
Ordinary life returned for six quiet minutes.
Then Nora said, “I hated him before this.”
“I know.”
“I want that on the record because I’m about to say something inconvenient.”
I looked at her.
“I don’t think he planned the attack with Selina.”
“Neither do I.”
She seemed surprised.
“You don’t?”
“No.”
Flynn’s reaction had been too immediate, too stupid, too uncontrolled.
That did not absolve him.
If anything, it made what he had done more revealing.
He had not needed a conspiracy to destroy me.
He had needed one accusation from the right woman.
The next day, I was moved out of intensive care.
Physical therapy began with the humiliating task of walking twelve feet.
Leah held one arm while another nurse managed the IV pole.
By step seven, sweat ran down my back.
By step ten, I hated both of them.
At twelve, Leah grinned.
“I knew you liked me.”
“I’m filing a complaint.”
“Spell my name correctly.”
When I returned to bed, exhausted, an envelope waited on the tray.
No return address.
Security had opened it before delivering it.
Inside was a photocopy of a bank statement.
One transfer had been circled in red.
$250,000.
The recipient was Cole Strategic Consulting.
The sender was not Vance Global.
It was me.
Or rather, it was an investment account bearing my name.
Nora read the page twice.
“You didn’t make this transfer.”
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
I looked at her.
She winced.
“Sorry.”
At the bottom of the page was a handwritten sentence.
Ask your husband what he purchased on February 14.
Valentine’s Day.
Flynn had told me he spent that evening in Boston.
I reached for my tablet.
Nora caught my wrist.
“Ruiz said not to contact him.”
“I’m not contacting him.”
I opened the cloud folder where I kept old financial records.
The February statement loaded slowly.
There was no transfer to Selina.
But there was something else.
A login notification from February 14 that I had ignored at the time because I assumed it was mine.
The access location was Chicago.
I had been in Chicago.
So had my laptop.
But I had not logged into that account that night.
I had been alone at home, waiting for flowers that never came.
Nora leaned closer.
“Who knew your password?”
“No one.”
Then an old memory surfaced.
Flynn standing behind me at the kitchen island two years earlier while I moved money between brokerage accounts.
He had joked that my passwords were embarrassingly predictable.
I had changed them afterward.
Or I thought I had.
The hospital door opened.
Detective Ruiz entered carrying a sealed evidence bag.
Inside it was my silver external drive.
“We recovered this from Selina’s apartment.”
My heartbeat accelerated.
“Was anything deleted?”
“We’re having that examined.”
She placed a photograph beside it.
It showed the back of the drive.
A tiny adhesive label had been added near the serial number.
Ruiz tapped it.
“Do you recognize that?”
I leaned closer.
Printed on the label were four words.
MABEL VANCE FINANCIAL ARCHIVE.
“No.”
Ruiz nodded.
“Neither did your sister.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means someone wanted this drive to be very easy to identify.”
She pulled another photograph from her folder.
This one showed the contents of a desk drawer in Selina’s apartment.
There were copies of bank statements, corporate transfer records, and a passport-sized photograph of me.
Beneath them lay a handwritten list of account numbers.
My account numbers.
Nora stopped breathing for a moment.
Ruiz looked at me.
“We also found a draft email on Ms. Cole’s laptop.”
“To whom?”
“An investigative reporter.”
My fingers tightened around the blanket.
“What did it say?”
“That she had evidence Mabel Vance had been stealing money from her husband’s company for years.”
I looked at the silver drive.
The stabbing had not been Selina’s plan.
It had been an accident.
A useful accident.
Whatever she had intended for me had begun long before she walked into my house crying.
Ruiz’s phone buzzed.
She checked the screen, and something in her expression changed.
“What?”
I asked.
She looked at Nora before answering.
“Forensics finished processing the bloodstained shirt fragment from your garage.”
“We already know it was Selina’s blood.”
“Yes.”
Ruiz slipped the phone back into her pocket.
“But now we know how it got there.”
I waited.
“There was another person’s DNA on the fabric.”
Nora stepped closer.
“Whose?”
Ruiz looked directly at me.
“Your husband’s.”
For several seconds, I could only hear the soft mechanical beeping beside my bed.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Nora said.
Ruiz’s face remained unreadable.
“It doesn’t prove what happened by itself.”
“What exactly did they find?”
“Touch DNA along the torn edge.”
May you like
I looked at the photograph again.
The fragment had come from one of Flynn’s old shirts.
