Chương 2
Marissa lifted the necklace away from her throat.
“Is something wrong?”
“Banking algorithms,” he said. “They see jewelry and panic.”
His phone began to vibrate. One notification followed another, the sound muffled in the pocket of his trousers. He ignored it until Nadia removed the necklace from Marissa and placed it inside the open velvet box.
“I can hold the piece for twenty-four hours,” Nadia said. “With a deposit.”
David glanced at her.
“I just attempted a deposit.”
Nadia closed the box without reacting. “You attempted the full purchase.”
“Right.”
Marissa had moved half a step away. David noticed because he noticed every shift in a room when he believed it concerned him.
His phone vibrated again.
He took it out.
CARD SUSPENDED.
ONLINE ACCESS RESTRICTED.
OUTBOUND TRANSFER PAUSED — CONTACT PRIVATE BANKING.
There were four missed calls from his office and one from the bank. Beneath them was an automated message concerning administrative privileges on accounts that, until sixty seconds earlier, he had treated as extensions of his own body.
He called Eleanor.
She watched his name appear on the dashboard while the traffic shook the car.
She let it ring.
A second call came before the first had fully disappeared.
Then a text.
Card issue. Did you change something?
Another arrived.
I’m with a client. This is embarrassing.
Eleanor almost laughed. The sound rose into her chest and stopped there. She pictured David in Boston, perhaps at a hotel desk, perhaps paying for lunch with board members. She tried to fit the diamond boutique into an explanation that did not require her marriage to have been happening somewhere else without her.
The explanations failed one by one.
The necklace might have been for her. Their twentieth anniversary was six months away, but David had planned extravagant surprises before. The merchant might have been mislabeled. Someone might have copied his card. He might have loaned it to an assistant. He might have been buying a retirement gift for someone Eleanor had forgotten.
She opened his location in the family-sharing application.
Location unavailable.
He had turned it off.
The phone rang again.
This time she answered.
“What did you do?” David said.
There was no greeting. Behind him she heard low voices, the subdued room tone of a store, and a single bright note from a door chime.
“I pulled over.”
“What?”
“I was driving. I pulled over.”
“Eleanor, my cards are frozen.”
“I know.”
“I’m standing here with a client.”
“In Boston?”
Silence passed between them.
David’s voice softened, the way it did when he wanted her to believe that calmness belonged to him and irrationality belonged to everyone else. “I came back early.”
“You left four hours ago.”
“The meeting changed.”
“You took the train from New York to Boston, attended a meeting, returned, and reached Fifth Avenue before eleven?”
He did not answer immediately.
Marissa said something in the background. Eleanor could not make out the words, only the question in her tone.
David covered the phone. His voice became a low murmur. Then he returned.
“This is not a conversation to have while you’re on the side of a highway.”
“That’s the first true thing you’ve said.”
“Where are you going?”
“San Francisco.”
“Then go. We’ll talk tonight.”
Eleanor looked at the terminal signs ahead of her. A plane lifted above the low industrial buildings, silver in the cool daylight.
“I stopped the transfers.”
This time the silence was different.
“What transfers?”
The question came too quickly.
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The bank saw two outbound transfers.”
“We run a business. There are transfers every day.”
“One required additional verification.”
“That could be anything.”
“You sound worried for a man who doesn’t know what it is.”
“I sound worried because you just froze operational accounts in the middle of a workday.”
“They aren’t frozen. Outbound movement is restricted.”
“For God’s sake, Eleanor.”
In the boutique, Nadia was pretending to review something on her tablet. Marissa had taken her coat from the back of a chair.
David lowered his voice. “Restore the accounts.”
“No.”
“You have a client meeting in five hours. You are emotional, and you are about to damage the company because of a jewelry charge you do not understand.”
“Who is she?”
He breathed out through his nose.
“Don’t do this over the phone.”
“Who is she?”
“There is no she.”
Eleanor heard the boutique door chime again. A woman’s heels crossed a hard floor, moving away.
David said, “Where are you?”
“You asked that already.”
“Send me your location.”
“No.”
“Eleanor.”
She ended the call.
For another minute she sat with both hands resting on the wheel. Her heart was beating too fast, but her thoughts had become strangely orderly. She called her assistant and canceled the flight. She sent the hotel group’s chief procurement officer a brief message about a family emergency and offered a video meeting for the following morning. Then she called Claire Benton.
Claire had represented Hayes Meridian for nine years and Eleanor personally for three hours during a labor dispute that had nearly turned into a lawsuit. She was a family lawyer only by accident, having once helped Eleanor’s mother revise an estate plan during a cancer recurrence. She answered on the fourth ring.
“I’m about to walk into court.”
“David spent fifteen thousand dollars at a diamond boutique with another woman.”
Claire was quiet.
“Do you know there was another woman?”
“I heard her.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No. I don’t know anything yet.”
“Good. Keep saying it that way.”
“There are also two transfers.”
Claire’s courtroom voice disappeared. “How large?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t confront him again.”
“I already did.”
“Of course you did.”
“I froze everything.”
“Everything personal?”
“Personal, household, family office, delegated access.”
“Business accounts?”
“Outbound transfers only.”
Claire swore softly.
May you like
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. You may have interrupted legitimate obligations and given him an argument that you used financial control to punish a spouse. You may also have prevented a theft. Both can be true. Where are you?”
