Chapter 3

# Chapter 3: Six Days

"I want everything he has, everything he hid, and everything he thinks I don't know about. You have forty-eight hours."

The man across the desk didn't blink. He was fifty or so, built like a retired boxer, with a gray crew cut and a coffee stain on his tie. The sign downstairs said *D. Mercer Investigations*. The office was above a laundromat, and the whole room smelled like warm detergent.

"Forty-eight hours is a short time, Mrs. Reed."

"I'm paying for a short time." I slid an envelope across the desk. Inside was twenty thousand dollars in cash and a flash drive with every photo I had taken at the restaurant. "Julian's second phone. A woman named Camille Voss. A boy named Oliver. I want addresses, bank records, dates, and who knows what. If anyone helped him hide them, I want their names."

Dale Mercer opened the envelope, counted the bills without hurry, and looked up at me.

"You know I have to ask. Is this a divorce, or are you planning something worse?"

"Divorce," I said. "Mostly."

He almost smiled. "Mostly is honest. I'll call you tonight."

I left through the back stairs and took a cab three blocks, then another one, then walked the rest. Julian had a driver who reported to his mother. I wasn't going to use him again.

By ten o'clock I was sitting in a cramped office on the fourth floor of an old building near the courthouse. Mr. Pruitt looked exactly the way I remembered him. Thin white hair, thick glasses, a cardigan that had been in style forty years ago. He had been my father's lawyer since before I was born.

He read the trust amendment from the restaurant slowly, one page at a time. I watched his face the whole time. Somewhere around page nine his mouth tightened.

"Serena," he said quietly. "Where did you get this?"

"Julian gave it to me last night. He wants me to sign by Friday."

"Do not sign it."

"I wasn't going to."

"I mean it. Do not sign this, and do not tell him you've shown it to me." He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "This would hand him control of everything your father built. Everything. And he'd be able to move it without your consent."

"Can you find out if he's already tried?"

Pruitt hesitated. "I would need to request the account history from the bank. It will take a day or two."

"Then please start now."

He studied me for a long moment, and something in his old, tired eyes changed. "Your father used to say you'd grow into your teeth one day. I think I'm looking at that day."

I almost cried. I had no time for it. "Thank you, Mr. Pruitt."

By noon I had a plan, and by one I had started moving.

I opened a company under my mother's maiden name, Harrow Holdings, which Julian had never once asked about. I split the cash I could reach into three accounts at three different banks. I sold some jewelry he had never seen me wear. I left the large trust alone for now, because moving it too early would alert him, and I needed him calm.

At three, I sat in a cafe across the street from an apartment building on Alder Street, with a hat pulled low and a paperback open in front of my face.

Dale's text had come an hour earlier. *Found her. Third floor, unit 3C. Leased under her sister's name.*

I had thought I'd feel something when I saw the building. Rage, maybe. Instead there was only a dull, practical curiosity, like inspecting a house I planned to buy.

The apartment across the street was for rent. The landlord asked no questions when I paid six months in cash. By four, I was standing at an empty window with a pair of binoculars and a folding chair.

At five-fifteen, Julian's black sedan pulled up.

He climbed out carrying grocery bags. Not the kind he had ever carried for me. He had the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and he was laughing at something on his phone. The front door of the building opened, and a small boy in a dinosaur sweater burst out and ran down the steps.

"Daddy!"

Julian dropped the bags on the sidewalk and caught him in midair.

I watched him spin the boy around. I watched Camille appear in the doorway with her arms crossed and a soft, patient smile, like a woman who had everything she wanted. I watched Julian kiss her cheek, and I watched the three of them go inside.

I kept the binoculars up long after they had gone.

Oliver had done nothing wrong. I told myself that as many times as I needed to. He was four. He had a missing tooth and a dinosaur sweater and a father who had decided what his life was worth. In the old world, when Julian pushed me out of the gate, he had made a choice between two people, and the boy had been in the arms of the one he picked. That was Julian's sin, not the child's.

But Camille had looked at me through that gate and smiled.

I lowered the binoculars.

That night I sat in a rented chair in an empty apartment, with a flashlight and the cream notepad from my desk. I wrote down every date I could remember. The day the cell towers failed. The day the water turned. The first supermarket that was looted, the second, the third. The exact hour the Skitters came up through the sewers on Fifth. I wrote the names of the guards at Safe Zone Four who could be bribed and the ones who couldn't.

My phone rang at ten. Dale.

"I've got something," he said. "Voss has been living off Julian for four years. Rent, car, daycare, a nanny. But that's not the strange part."

"What is?"

"Her sister's name on the lease isn't a sister. It's a shell company that was set up by Julian's finance director, using funds routed out of a place called the Hale Family Trust."

I closed my eyes. "That's mine."

"I figured." A pause. "There's more, but I'd rather show you. Pruitt called me too. He said you two should talk tonight."

I was at Pruitt's office in twenty minutes.

The old man was standing at his desk in a rumpled shirt, surrounded by bank statements. He looked like he hadn't blinked in an hour. When I walked in, he lifted one sheet of paper with a shaking hand.

"Mrs. Reed," he said. "Your husband withdrew forty million dollars from your trust yesterday morning. It was authorized with your signature."

I took the page and read it twice. The handwriting was good. It was very good. The loops were right, and the little slant at the end, the habit I'd had since boarding school.

"Mr. Pruitt," I said slowly. "I never signed anything."