Chapter 4: The Engraving
My best friend Petra had known me for eleven years.
She'd been at my hospital bedside after a car accident at twenty-six, helped me move into my first office space, and sat with me the night I took a pregnancy test alone in my bathroom because Weston had been at a "networking dinner."
She opened her front door before I'd finished knocking.
"You look like you drove here on autopilot," she said.
"I did."
She stepped back and let me in.
I sat at her kitchen table and opened the email on my laptop while she made tea.
I didn't ask for tea.
She made it anyway and set it beside me without a word.
The bank statements were methodical.
Dani had organized everything by date.
Forty-one transfers over nineteen months, ranging from eight hundred dollars to four thousand.
Each one with a note in the memo line.
*Rent shortfall.
Payroll gap.
Server costs.
Emergency.*
"He used the same words on me," I said.
Petra sat down across from me.
"How much?"
"From her, forty thousand.
From me—" I pulled up my own records on my phone.
I'd been keeping a running total for months, half out of habit, half out of a feeling I hadn't let myself name.
"A hundred and twelve thousand.
Over two years.
Agency invoices I covered.
His personal rent before he moved in with me.
The car.
His mother's medical bill last spring that he said he'd pay back."
Petra's hands went still around her mug.
"He cried about that one too," I said.
"Told me he was ashamed.
That he'd never felt so helpless.
I told him family doesn't keep score."
"Ava."
"I know."
I opened the jeweler's receipt.
The bracelet.
Rose gold, eighteen carat, with an engraving on the inner band.
*Always — W*
"That's not my bracelet," I said.
"No."
"He bought it eleven months ago." I set the laptop down.
"We'd been living together for three months at that point.
I was already paying his phone bill."
Petra didn't say anything.
She reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
"There's more," I said.
"Dani sent screenshots of their messages.
They were still talking six months into my relationship with him.
Not romantically — she'd ended it by then.
But he was still asking her for money.
Telling her the startup was close to a breakthrough.
That he just needed one more bridge."
"Did she give it to him?"
"The last transfer was fourteen months ago.
Four thousand dollars.
After that she stopped responding and he stopped asking." I closed the laptop.
"She said she spent six months trying to decide whether to contact me.
She said she kept thinking it wasn't her place."
"She was right to call."
"I know." I picked up the tea.
It was too hot but I held it anyway.
"The wedding is in six weeks.
The venue is paid.
The band is paid.
I've already sent invitations to sixty-three people."
"What do you want to do?"
I thought about Weston's face in that living room.
Not the anger, not the foot, not even the locked door.
The moment just before all of it — when Corinne had said *give me your ATM card* and Weston had looked at me with something that was almost impatient.
Like I was a problem that needed solving.
Like the money was already his and I was just being slow about handing it over.
"I want to know if there's anyone else," I said.
Petra looked at me carefully.
"You think there is?"
"I think a man who borrowed forty thousand from one woman and a hundred and twelve thousand from another, while living rent-free and planning a wedding he hasn't paid a dollar toward — I think that man has a system.
And systems don't usually start with you."
The kitchen was quiet.
"I have a friend," Petra said slowly.
"She does private financial investigations.
Mostly for divorce cases.
She's thorough and she's discreet."
"Call her."
Petra reached for her phone.
I looked at the closed laptop.
Somewhere inside it, a bracelet engraved *Always — W* sat in a jeweler's photograph, bought for a woman whose name I still didn't know.
I was going to find out.
And I was going to find out everything else too.
My phone lit up on the table.
A text from Weston.
*I love you.
Please don't do anything drastic.
We can fix this.*
I turned the phone face-down.
May you like
There was nothing left to fix.
There was only what needed to be uncovered — and how far back it went.
