Chapter 3: What Three Years of Statements Can Tell You
The name on the account was Delia Marsh.
I said it out loud, alone at my kitchen table at eleven-thirty at night, just to hear how it sounded.
"Delia Marsh."
It meant nothing to me.
And yet Everett had listed her as a secondary beneficiary on a private savings account holding just over $340,000.
An account opened six years ago.
Two years before I ever suspected anything was wrong.
I pulled up the full statement history.
The deposits were regular.
Methodical.
Never large enough to trigger a review.
$4,800 here.
$6,200 there.
Always just under the reporting threshold.
My hands were steady as I photographed every page.
The next morning I called our attorney, a woman named Patricia Hale, who had handled our property contracts for years and who I had always liked for the simple reason that she never wasted words.
"Patricia," I said when she picked up.
"I need to move quickly."
"How quickly?"
"He's already on a plane."
A pause.
"Come in at two."
I was there at one-fifty.
Patricia's office was on the fourteenth floor of a building downtown, with a view of the city that Everett had always admired.
I had never paid much attention to it before.
I noticed it now.
I laid the bank statements on her desk in order.
Then the beneficiary form.
Then the transaction history from Lumina Jewelers.
Patricia didn't touch anything for a moment.
She read each page where it sat.
"He opened this account before the marriage?" she said.
"No.
Two years into it."
"And you had no knowledge of it."
"None."
She finally picked up the beneficiary form.
Held it at the edge, the way you handle something you don't want your fingerprints on.
"Delia Marsh," she said.
"Do you know the name?"
"I don't." She set it down.
"But I will by tomorrow."
She looked at me directly then, the way people rarely do when delivering serious news.
Most look slightly away.
Patricia didn't.
"Stella, if he structured these transfers deliberately to stay under reporting limits, that's not just marital misconduct.
That's a pattern.
It may qualify as financial fraud."
"I know."
"That changes the divorce filing considerably."
"I know that too."
She nodded once, as if confirming something she had already suspected about me.
"I'll need full access to every joint account.
Every property document.
Every investment record you can locate."
"I have three years already organized," I said.
"I'll send the rest tonight."
She almost smiled.
"You've been preparing for this."
"I've been hoping I was wrong," I said.
"I wasn't."
I drove home in the early evening, the city going amber around me.
When I walked through the front door, Shirley was seated in the armchair in my living room — my armchair, the one I had owned since before I met Everett — watching television at a volume that filled every room.
She didn't look up.
"You were gone all afternoon," she said.
"I had a meeting."
"Everett called the house phone.
You didn't answer your cell."
"I was in a meeting," I said again, pleasantly.
She finally looked at me.
Something moved behind her eyes — not quite suspicion, but close to it.
"He said the bank issue still isn't resolved."
"I'm working on it," I said.
I went upstairs, closed my bedroom door, and sent Patricia forty-seven additional documents before midnight.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, Everett was sitting in business class, probably ordering his second drink, probably convinced that by morning I would have sorted out the card problem and everything would return to the arrangement he had designed.
May you like
He had no idea that Patricia had already run Delia Marsh's name through three different databases.
And what she found waiting in her inbox the next morning would change the shape of everything.
