Chapter 2
I am an accountant. It is, on the surface, an unglamorous profession, and it had made me, over fourteen years of marriage, the kind of person Lauren had apparently come to view as fundamentally unthreatening — careful, quiet, easy to underestimate. What she did not factor into her calculations was that careful and quiet are exactly the qualities that make someone extremely good at building a case slowly, methodically, without tipping anyone off until the case is complete.
I had not gone looking for an affair when I first opened Lauren's laptop to find a tax document. I had found infidelity, and then, following the same instinct that makes me good at my actual job, I had kept looking, because the financial pattern underneath the affair didn't add up. Daniel Price was co-owner of Halverson Price Logistics alongside his wife, Claire Price, who held forty percent of the company and ran its finance division. Over the preceding eleven months, I found nearly two hundred thousand dollars in client development and travel expenses that traced back to hotels, restaurants, and a leased apartment in the same city where Lauren had attended "industry conferences" six times that year.
I am not a forensic accountant by trade, but I know how to read a ledger, and what I found looked less like a careless affair and more like a man systematically funding a second life through his own company's books, with his wife as co-owner unknowingly carrying half the financial exposure if the IRS or the company's auditors ever looked closely.
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So I called Claire Price.
I did not call her angry, and I did not call her as a wounded husband looking for an ally in his own grief. I called her, three weeks before the party, as someone who had stumbled onto something her business partner — and, I suspected, possibly her own marriage — needed her to see. I sent her copies of what I'd found. She was quiet on the phone for a long time, and then she told me, in the flat voice of someone confirming a suspicion she'd been carrying without proof for months, that she had noticed irregularities in the travel budget herself but hadn't been able to trace them to a clear pattern.
