Chapter 3 - THE WOMAN IN MY HOUSE
“I was in bed alone that night.”
Dakota said it quietly.
Martin held the tablet between us.
The cabin hummed around us while people slept, watched movies, and drank wine, completely unaware that my marriage and career were being dismantled ten feet away.
I looked at the date.
February 18.
Dallas leadership conference.
I remembered calling Dakota from my hotel room around eleven.
She had sounded tired.
She'd said she was studying emergency procedures before bed.
“You're sure?” I asked.
Dakota's eyes flashed.
“Be very careful with your next sentence.”
“I mean, could anyone have come over?”
“No.”
“Family? A neighbor?”
“No.”
Martin enlarged the login information.
“The authorization originated from your residential IP address.”
Trinity leaned closer.
“What was purchased?”
Martin hesitated.
“Travel consulting.”
“That sounds fake,” she said.
“It was.”
The recipient was a company called Bellweather Strategies.
I had never heard of it.
Three invoices.
$9,800.
$12,400.
$7,600.
All approved using my executive credentials.
“Someone had my password,” I said.
Martin looked at me.
“Did your wife?”
I immediately said no.
Dakota stared at me.
That answer mattered.
Even now.
Even after everything I'd done, I wasn't going to save myself by throwing suspicion on her.
“I never gave Dakota my corporate login.”
Martin nodded.
“What about Trinity?”
“No.”
Trinity gave me a dark look.
“I didn't even know his real job title until tonight.”
Dakota almost smiled at that.
Almost.
Then I noticed the bracelet again.
The gold links caught the cabin light.
My mother's bracelet.
Something about it pulled a memory loose.
February 18.
Dallas.
Dakota had called me the next morning.
She'd said my sister had stopped by unexpectedly to borrow something.
I sat upright.
“Claire.”
Dakota frowned.
“What?”
“My sister was at the house.”
“For twenty minutes.”
“What did she want?”
Dakota thought.
“Your father's leather portfolio.”
I felt a chill.
My father had died four years earlier.
His brown leather portfolio had sat untouched in the office closet ever since.
Inside were old business cards, handwritten notes, and several documents from the years when he'd helped me establish my career.
Including, possibly, passwords I had foolishly written down before our company required two-factor authentication.
Martin looked sharply at me.
“Where is the portfolio now?”
I met Dakota's eyes.
“I don't know.”
She understood immediately.
“Neither do I.”
For the first time, the mystery moved away from Dakota.
But it moved somewhere I didn't want it to go.
Claire was my younger sister.
Thirty-nine.
Recently divorced.
Financially unstable for the past year.
And furious with me because I'd refused to invest in her event-planning business.
“No,” I said.
Dakota folded her arms.
“You thought 'no' about me pretty quickly.”
“Claire wouldn't steal from my company.”
“You didn't think you'd cheat on me either.”
That silenced me.
Trinity turned toward the window.
Even Martin looked away.
Dakota had earned that shot.
The strange thing was, she didn't look satisfied after delivering it.
Only tired.
Martin returned to his seat to contact the company's compliance director through the aircraft Wi-Fi.
Dakota resumed service.
That left me alone with Trinity.
For several minutes, neither of us spoke.
Then she removed her Florence hotel confirmation from her purse.
She tore it slowly in half.
“I paid for my return ticket myself,” she said.
“Trinity—”
“Don't.”
“I never meant for you to—”
“To what? Find out there were other women?”
“There weren't other affairs.”
She laughed once.
“You really think the distinction is helping you?”
I rubbed my face.
The woman from three Thursdays earlier was Melissa Grant, a recruiter.
She had come to the house because she was considering me for a position with a competitor.
Dakota was away.
Melissa and I drank too much.
She kissed me.
I stopped it.
Eventually.
Nothing more happened.
But I hadn't told Dakota because there was no version of that story that made me look innocent.
And now my watch had turned the secret into something uglier.
Trinity stared at me.
“You know what your problem is?”
“I assume you're about to tell me.”
“You don't lie because you're evil.”
She shook her head.
“You lie because every time the truth might cost you something, you convince yourself you'll fix it later.”
That landed harder than I expected.
Because it was true.
I had intended to end things with Trinity.
Later.
Tell Dakota.
Later.
Reimburse the charges.
Later.
Admit the recruiter had been in our home.
Later.
Every moral debt had been moved to tomorrow.
And now tomorrow had arrived at thirty-seven thousand feet.
An hour later, Dakota returned.
She held a small plastic evidence bag.
Inside was a paper boarding pass.
Not ours.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“Your navy overcoat.”
The same coat.
The same pocket where she'd found the first Chicago hotel receipt.
She placed the bag on my tray.
The boarding pass was nine months old.
Nashville to Charlotte.
Passenger:
CLAIRE WHITMORE.
My sister's married name.
On the back, written in blue ink, were five numbers.
Martin came back and saw it.
His face changed.
“What?”
He took the bag without touching the paper directly.
“Those five numbers.”
“Yes?”
“They're the suffix of the first fraudulent vendor account.”
Dakota sat in the empty aisle seat across from us.
“Why would Claire have that?”
I didn't know.
Then I remembered something else.
Nine months earlier, Claire had called me crying from Nashville.
She said she'd lost a major client.
Asked me for $30,000.
I refused.
Three days later, she told me she had found an investor.
“What was the investor's name?” Dakota asked.
“She never told me.”
Trinity had been listening.
Suddenly she reached into her purse.
She pulled out her phone.
“I might know.”
All of us turned toward her.
She opened a photograph from a charity gala six months earlier.
“I met Nathan at this event.”
She zoomed in behind us.
There, half-visible near the bar, stood Claire.
Beside her was a man I recognized from company headquarters.
Evan Pike.
Director of vendor procurement.
Martin swore under his breath.
Evan had access to reimbursement systems.
Vendor onboarding.
Approval-routing architecture.
Almost everything needed to build a fraud scheme.
But one thing made no sense.
“Claire doesn't know Evan.”
Trinity looked at me.
“She did that night.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw them arguing.”
Dakota's eyes narrowed.
“About what?”
“I couldn't hear all of it.”
Trinity enlarged the image.
Claire's hand was clenched around something.
A necklace.
Not jewelry.
A lanyard.
An access badge.
Mine.
My old executive badge.
The one I'd reported missing last winter.
Martin leaned forward.
“That's enough to justify a formal investigation.”
I barely heard him.
I was staring at Claire's face.
She looked frightened.
Not guilty.
Frightened.
Then Trinity swiped to the next photograph.
The shot had been accidental, taken seconds later.
Evan was walking away.
Claire remained near the bar.
Behind her, reflected in a mirror, was another person.
Dakota gasped.
Because the reflected woman was wearing Dakota's red winter coat.
The coat she'd donated months earlier.
Except Dakota had never donated it.
She had asked me to drop it off at Goodwill.
I hadn't.
I'd left it in my trunk for weeks.
I stared at the reflection.
Then recognized the woman inside that coat.
Melissa Grant.
The recruiter who had been in my house.
Dakota whispered, “Nathan.”
I looked at her.
She pointed at Melissa's hand.
Around Melissa's wrist was my mother's gold bracelet.
The same bracelet Dakota was wearing now.
Except the photograph had been taken six months ago.
Dakota looked down at her wrist.
May you like
Then unclasped the bracelet with trembling fingers.
“This isn't mine.”
