Chương 5
“If this is about Mom’s lamp, I still have it.”
“What lamp?”
“Oh, good, different crisis.”
“Did Scott contact you about me moving?”
The traffic noise disappeared.
Not literally.
She had simply stopped speaking over it.
“When?”
I gripped the phone.
“Rebecca.”
“Last week.”
My chair creaked as I sat back.
“What did he say?”
“He said you two were separating.”
The room seemed suddenly too bright.
“And you didn’t call me?”
“I tried.”
I checked my call history.
Nothing.
“When?”
“Thursday night.”
“I don’t have a call from you.”
“I left a voicemail.”
“There is no voicemail.”
She was silent.
Then she said, very softly, “Claire, he told me not to push you because you were embarrassed.”
I closed my eyes.
“What else?”
“He asked if I would be your emergency contact on a lease.”
I pressed my knuckles against my mouth.
“Did you agree?”
“I said yes because I thought you had already signed it.”
Her voice broke around the last word.
“I thought I was helping you.”
I looked at the shredded strips on my desk.
Scott had not needed everyone to lie for him.
He had only needed each person to believe someone else already knew the truth.
“Rebecca,” I said, “I need you to tell me exactly what Scott said.”
She took a breath.
Then she told me about the conversation that had happened before the block party, before the apartment, and before anyone had asked me when I was moving.
And halfway through her account, she mentioned a bank account I had never heard of.
Rebecca called it the Harbor Ridge account.
I had never banked with Harbor Ridge.
Scott apparently had.
“He said it was where you wanted your share deposited until you figured out what to do,” Rebecca said.
“My share of what?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
There was a small, miserable silence.
“I thought you were leaving him, Claire.”
“So you stopped asking questions?”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, none of this is fair.”
The sharpness in my voice surprised both of us.
Rebecca went quiet.
I rubbed my forehead.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
She was right.
“I’m angry.”
“I know.”
“At him.”
“I know that too.”
A horn sounded somewhere near her.
Then she said, “He made it sound like you didn’t want anyone making a big deal out of it.”
“That sounds like me.”
“That’s why I believed him.”
That hurt more than I expected.
Scott had built his story from pieces of my actual personality.
I did hate scenes.
I did pull away when embarrassed.
I did tell my family less than I should when things were bad.
He had not invented a new Claire.
He had weaponized the old one.
“What did he say about Harbor Ridge?”
Rebecca exhaled slowly.
“He asked if I knew whether you still used your old maiden-name email for financial stuff.”
I sat upright.
“What?”
“I told him I didn’t know.”
“Why would he ask you that?”
“He said the bank had an old contact address and you were frustrated because some transfer was being delayed.”
My mouth went dry.
“What email did you give him?”
“I didn’t give him one.”
Relief came too quickly.
Then she added, “But I told him you used to have claire.mercer at something.”
My maiden name was Mercer.
The email account had been created in college and abandoned years ago.
I could not remember the password.
“Did he ask anything else?”
“He asked about Dad’s trust.”
I stopped breathing for a second.
Our father had died four years earlier.
He had not been wealthy.
There was no mansion, no mysterious fortune, nothing remotely dramatic.
There had been a life insurance policy, a modest investment account, and proceeds from selling the small house where Rebecca and I grew up.
My share had come to a little over one hundred thousand dollars.
I had placed most of it into an investment account Scott encouraged me to open.
I had not thought about the exact balance in months.
“What did he ask?”
“Whether Dad left the money to both of you or just you.”
I gripped the edge of my desk.
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth.”
Rebecca’s voice hardened.
“That it was yours.”
I closed my eyes.
The brokerage account.
The distribution request.
The shredded authorization.
For the first time, the pieces did not merely suggest that Scott wanted me out of the house.
They suggested he wanted something moved before I understood where it belonged.
“Rebecca, I have to go.”
“Claire.”
“What?”
“I’m coming over tonight.”
“No.”
“I’m not asking.”
“I don’t need—”
“You absolutely need somebody who will annoy you in person.”
Despite everything, a laugh escaped me.
“That sounds like you.”
“Good.”
She hung up.
I called Maya immediately.
She listened, asked for Rebecca’s phone number, then told me not to access the old email until I had secured my current accounts.
“Why?”
“Because if someone else has access, logging in may alert them.”
That sentence rearranged my afternoon.
I changed passwords from my work computer, beginning with email, payroll, my personal credit card, and the bank account I had opened before marrying Scott and barely used.
I enabled authentication on my own phone wherever possible.
Then I requested credit reports.
At four twelve, Daniel appeared in my doorway holding two vending-machine coffees.
“You look like somebody just explained cryptocurrency to your grandmother.”
“My grandmother would understand it better than I do.”
He handed me one cup.
It tasted burned and vaguely medicinal.
I drank it anyway.
“Find anything?”
I showed him the partial Harbor Ridge reference Rebecca had texted me from her notes.
Daniel frowned.
“Could be a bank, investment platform, credit union.”
“Can we search?”
“We can search the name.”
“We?”
He shrugged.
“You’re not driving home alone with your brain doing whatever your brain is currently doing.”
“What is my brain doing?”
“Trying to commit six crimes and solve nine others.”
May you like
That was close enough.
Harbor Ridge Financial existed, but the public website told us little beyond generic wealth-management language.
