Chapter 4
Melanie Harper, it turned out, was the only one of the three of us who hadn't known about either marriage. She had believed Lucas was a single man relocating to Palm Springs to be near her during her pregnancy. When Carla and I, through Diane, finally reached her — gently, deliberately, not as enemies but as two women extending the same warning neither of us had received — she was eleven weeks from her due date and had just been hospitalized for the preeclampsia documented in that first photograph.
She did not know about the Zurich lie. She did not know about Carla. She did not know that the fifty-thousand-dollar wire that had funded her medical deposit had come from an account containing money Lucas had quietly been siphoning out of my inheritance for the better part of a year, structured in transfers small enough to avoid triggering the bank's standard fraud alerts.
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I did not freeze the joint account that afternoon. I consulted with Diane the following morning and instead worked with her to document everything — every transfer, every lease, every flight record Lucas had generated under both names — before taking any action that might alert him to what we'd discovered. We let him land in what he believed was Zurich. We let him spend four days establishing his cover story with his actual employer, a logistics firm that had no idea its "international relocation" was a man building an elaborate double life across three states and two identities.
Then, with Diane's guidance, we moved together.
