Chapter 4
The first thing I found was a thread of messages between Claire and a man named Marcus Webb going back eleven months, which told me the timeline, which meant the pregnancy was possibly seven or eight weeks along based on the content of the most recent exchange, which meant she had known for at least three weeks and had said nothing to me except honey and come sleep and you worry too much.
The second thing I found, in a separate thread with a different number that was saved under a woman's name I did not recognize, was a conversation about a lawyer.
Not Marcus's lawyer. Not a divorce lawyer. A different kind.
The thread was about my company.
I should explain what my company is, because I have not explained it yet, and it matters for what comes next. Three years ago I left the construction management firm and started my own outfit with a partner named Roy Decker, a man I had worked beside for six years and trusted completely. We had built something that had taken two years to stop feeling precarious and one year to become genuinely solid, a project management and site oversight company that had three municipal contracts and two private development accounts and a reputation in the Dayton area that we had built brick by careful brick. I was proud of it. It was the thing in my life that was entirely mine, built from what I had and what I knew, and I had not spoken to Claire about the specifics of it the way I probably should have, partly because the early years had been stressful enough that I protected her from the worst of the uncertainty, and partly because by the time the company became something worth talking about, I had gotten out of the habit.
The thread with the unknown number was about my company's contracts.
Specifically, about a bid we had submitted three weeks ago for a county infrastructure project, the largest single contract we had ever pursued, the kind of account that would have taken us from solid to established in a single year. The thread included details about our bid that only someone with access to my home office files could have known. Bid amounts. Subcontractor relationships. A timeline that was not public.
Someone had taken that information somewhere.
The third message in the thread said Marcus has a contact at the county office. If they tank the Carr bid, the Morrison Group picks it up and we get the referral fee we discussed.
I sat on the floor of the laundry room with my back against the dryer and read it twice.
The gift. He said he had a gift for my husband. This was what he meant. Not something delivered to the house. Something done to the company. Something that was already in motion, that had already been set up, that was going to arrive before I even understood I was in the middle of it.
I took screenshots of everything with my own phone. Eleven months of messages. The thread with the unknown number. A third thread I found when I kept looking, between Claire and Marcus, that discussed what the financial settlement would look like if the company lost the county bid and I had to take on debt to cover the gap, and how that would position her in a divorce filing.
May you like
It was thorough. I want to say that even sitting on that laundry room floor I could recognize that it was thorough, the way you recognize the quality of something even when the thing is designed to destroy you. She had not been careless. She had been building this for almost a year.
But she had not counted on one thing.
