Chương 3
My first impulse was to call Chase.
That embarrassed me more than the missing money.
Some part of me still wanted an explanation shaped like the man I had believed him to be.
A mistake.
A temporary transfer.
A surprise payment.
Anything ordinary enough to let me put the last hour back inside a box and close the lid.
Instead, I photographed every page in the folder.
Then I carried the folder to my office.
The room was barely large enough for the desk, two bookcases, and the printer Chase had complained was ugly.
I locked the door behind me even though I was alone.
It was nearly eleven by then.
My phone showed fourteen missed calls from Chase, nine from Diane, and three texts from numbers I did not recognize.
The first unknown message said, Please call me before you do something rash.
The second said, Chase is injured and you may be legally responsible.
The third contained only a business card image for a lawyer named Martin Bell.
I saved screenshots of all three.
Then I opened the wedding account on my laptop.
Working at home was usually something I avoided.
I had learned years earlier that if I let work follow me through my front door, it ate dinner with me and slept beside me.
That night, I wanted work beside me.
Work made sense.
People lied.
Numbers did not care who I loved.
The earliest questionable transfer had gone out eleven weeks earlier for eight hundred dollars.
The description read EVENT CONSULTING.
Four days later, another transfer went to the same destination.
Twelve hundred.
Then two thousand.
Then three thousand five hundred.
The amounts grew as the wedding date came closer.
I exported the complete transaction history and built a spreadsheet.
At 11:43, I noticed something that made me sit back.
The recipient name was not the catering company listed on the ivory folder.
It was DMC Lifestyle Services LLC.
DMC.
Diane Mercer Chase.
The initials were almost insulting.
I searched the Illinois business registry.
The company existed.
It had been formed fourteen months earlier.
Its registered agent was Martin Bell, the lawyer whose card had just appeared in my messages.
The listed manager was Diane Mercer.
I whispered a word my mother would have objected to.
Then I searched property records, professional databases, and the systems I legally used through work.
I was careful not to cross that line.
My anger did not give me permission to commit a crime.
DMC Lifestyle Services had no obvious office, no public website, and no employees I could find.
It did, however, have a mailing address.
The address belonged to a private mailbox store three blocks from Chase’s real estate office.
At 12:18, Chase sent another text.
You are destroying us over a misunderstanding.
I did not answer.
Two minutes later came another.
Mom was trying to help.
Then another.
I never would have hit you.
That one stopped my hands over the keyboard.
Not I did not raise my fist.
Not You misunderstood what happened.
I never would have hit you.
The distinction was small and enormous.
I saved the message.
My phone rang again.
I let it ring.
Then a voicemail notification appeared.
I listened once.
Chase sounded calmer.
“Whitney, call me back.”
There was a pause.
“Look, tonight got out of control.”
Another pause.
“You know I’d never hurt you.”
His breathing changed near the microphone.
“You kicked me pretty hard, by the way.”
Then his tone sharpened.
“This wedding is six weeks away, and there are people depending on us to act like adults.”
The voicemail ended.
I listened again because I wanted to hear whether I had imagined the last sentence.
People depending on us.
Not guests.
Not vendors.
People.
At half past midnight, I made coffee and forgot to put the filter basket in correctly.
Brown water spread across the counter.
I stood there watching it drip onto the floor.
Then I laughed.
It was not a happy sound.
I had spent all night tracking money and could not successfully operate the machine I had owned for six years.
I cleaned the mess with a dish towel.
The towel had little blue lemons on it.
Chase hated those towels.
He once said they made my expensive kitchen look like a rental cottage.
I had kept them because that irritated me.
The thought made my throat tighten.
Not because of the towels.
Because I was beginning to see how many small objections I had filed away as harmless preferences.
His comments about my clothes before client dinners.
His habit of checking which earrings I chose before we visited his mother.
The way he would say, “Maybe not those,” with a smile gentle enough to disguise the command.
At one in the morning, I stopped.
Fatigue is an investigator’s enemy.
So is rage.
I encrypted the files, backed them up to my firm’s secure server, and sent a short email to my operations director, Mara Singh.
I wrote only that I had discovered a personal financial issue involving an account connected to me and needed her to preserve anything I sent without reviewing it until I gave permission.
Mara replied four minutes later.
Of course she was awake.
She had a six-month-old baby.
Her reply contained three words.
Got it.
You okay?
I stared at the question.
Then I typed, Not really.
Her next message arrived immediately.
Need me?
I almost said no.
That was my default answer to nearly everything.
Instead, I typed, Tomorrow morning.
At 1:37, I locked the office and returned to the kitchen.
The cracked engagement photograph was still on the floor.
One of the officers had moved the larger pieces of glass aside, but the frame remained where it had fallen.
I picked it up.
The photograph had been taken in Napa the weekend Chase proposed.
He was kissing my temple.
I was laughing at something outside the frame.
May you like
The ring on my hand had caught the sunset.
At the time, I had thought the photograph captured happiness.
