Chapter 2

Years ago my mother sold the storefront that had come with her dowry and emptied her savings to help Eric launch his company.

In the early days I handled the finances and vetted the contracts, until Eric said my health wasn't good and sent me home to rest.

But I still had the right to look up the old accounts, the ones tied to the early investment and the large outlays.

Using the appraisal slip the jeweler had written up for me, I searched the company's expense records from three years back for anything about jewelry work.

One line jumped out, logged as "client business gift."

The payment date was the day before Eric handed the fake bracelet back to me.

The attachment broke it into three items: reworking old gold into a pair of wedding bands, one high-quality replica of the old bracelet, and remaining gold held in reserve.

So he hadn't scrambled to fake it after I found out.

He'd planned the whole thing long before.

Melt down the real bracelet, turn it into wedding bands, then make a new copy of the bracelet to give back to me.

Whether or not I ever saw Monica's posts, my mother's gold bracelet was never going to come back to my hand.

I saved the expense records and got in touch with the jeweler who'd done the work.

The manager cross-checked the order number and payment details, then pulled up the photos they kept on file.

In the first photo the bracelet hadn't been melted yet.

The "Nina, be safe" on the inside was clear, and beside it lay the old receipt from when my mother bought it.

In the second photo the bracelet was gone. All that was left was a pair of plain gold wedding bands.

The inside of the man's band was engraved with an E, the woman's with an M.

The date on the bands was the day my mother was buried.

I stared at that string of numbers, and my chest felt like it was being hollowed out inch by inch.

While I was kneeling at the grave, begging my mother not to leave me, Eric was using what she'd left behind to promise the rest of his life to another woman.

There was a third page in the file.

The gold left over three years ago had been taken out by Eric last month and made into a child's gold protection charm.

Delivery date was today.

The order note read: first-birthday gift for Humphrey James.

The recipient wasn't Eric, and it wasn't Monica. It was Gillian Dickerson, the best friend I'd known for seventeen years.

Three years ago it was Gillian who went with me to track Monica down, Gillian who held me and cursed for an entire night, who said the one kind of woman she despised most in this life was the kind who broke up someone else's family.

I called Gillian.

She picked up fast. Behind her I could just make out music and a child laughing.

I asked where she was.

She paused, then told me in an easy voice that she was with her father for a follow-up appointment and would reach out later.

She played it well. If I hadn't already seen the address on the delivery slip, I'd have believed her still.

I made separate backups of the jeweler's appraisal slip, the company expense records, and the shop's file photos, and sent them to my lawyer.

Then I answered Eric's message pushing me to sign.

"I'll bring the authorization over myself."

He replied almost instantly: "Good. The usual place."

The usual place.

Ten years married, and I didn't even know where he meant.

Before I went to the hotel, I checked the Southern branch office's personnel files one more time.

Three years ago, right in front of me, Eric had signed Monica's transfer papers. He said the South was twelve hundred miles away, that he'd never see her again.

But the branch had no record of Monica ever being hired.

After her name vanished from her old department, the company acquired a consulting advisor listed under nothing but initials.

There was a fixed advisory fee every month, a residence the company leased long-term, housekeeping, a driver, and insurance all filed under executive benefits.

I opened the annual maintenance photos for that "executive apartment."

On the living room wall hung a wedding portrait of Eric and Monica. Two pairs of adult slippers sat in the entryway, and the door of the child's room had three words stuck on it: Humphrey's Room.

For three years, every month Eric had blocked out two days at the company for an "out-of-town board meeting."

I used to pack his bag with my own hands, tucking in his stomach medicine and clean clothes one piece at a time, aching for him because all that flying back and forth wore him out.

So it turned out he'd never gone out of town at all.

He'd just taken the bag I packed and gone to be with another woman and their child.

I bundled these records together and sent them to my lawyer too, then canceled every pending authorization Eric had submitted this year in my name.

I also contacted the property office at the old house and voided the long-term key card Eric held.

Hadn't he said he wanted to turn the place into a showroom? Starting now, he couldn't so much as get through the door.

This time, I wasn't going to turn back.

After I hung up, I took off the wedding ring I'd worn for ten years and set it beside the fake bracelet.

One hollow, one gold-plated. The two of them looked more like a married couple than Eric and I ever had.

Only when all of it was done did I drive out to meet the board meeting he'd talked about.