All Chapters of THE STAND-IN WIFE: Three weeks,One lie,No way out: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

33 Chapters

Chapter Twenty-One: "The Street"

ZARAMonday, 6:11pmThe three of them stood on the pavement outside the building and the city went past them like nothing had happened.Callum was on his phone. Richard's flight. Arrival time. Voice low, turned slightly away.Isla stood beside Zara with her coat pulled closed and her eyes on the middle distance.You knew, Zara said quietly. That someone would take the folder.Isla looked at her.I suspected, she said. I brought copies because I suspected.And the message this morning, Zara said. Telling you to wait.I've been receiving messages for three weeks, Isla said. Different numbers. Different phrasing. All of them telling me to hold off. She paused. I stopped asking who was sending them and started asking why they needed me to wait.And, Zara said.My waiting served someone else's timeline, Isla said. Not mine.Zara looked at the building behind them. The glass doors. The lobby visible through them, the event still continuing inside.She thought about the grey suit. Thirty-sev

Chapter Twenty-Two: "The Investigator"

ZARAMonday, 7:48pmHer name was Helen Marsh and she worked out of a one-room office on the fourth floor of a building on West Forty-Fourth Street with no directory listing and a door with no nameplate.Callum had called ahead from a payphone two blocks away.She was waiting when they arrived.Mid-fifties. Dark hair threaded with grey. The same woman Zara had met weeks ago when she'd gone to read the Reyes addendum. She registered that without showing it.Helen looked at both of them. Then at the door behind them.Come in, she said.The office was small and deliberately so. One desk. Two chairs across from it. A window facing a brick wall. A filing cabinet with a combination lock. On the desk a legal pad, a pen, and a manila folder placed there recently enough that the edges were still crisp.They sat.Helen sat across from them.She looked at the folder. Then at Zara.I was going to call you tomorrow, she said. I've been sitting on something for nine days.Nine days, Callum said.Sin

Chapter Twenty-Three: "Eleven O'Clock"

ZARAMonday, 11:03pmThe hotel was the kind that had existed since the fifties and stopped trying to be anything other than what it was. Dark wood panelling. Carpet that had been good once. A bar off the lobby that served decent whisky and didn't ask questions.Richard Arch was already there.Third floor. A room booked under a name that wasn't his. He opened the door when they knocked and stood back without saying anything.Small room. A desk, a chair, a bed that hadn't been touched. On the desk a glass of water and a manila envelope, thick, sealed, placed there with the care of something carried a long way.Richard looked at them both.He looked older than he had at the West Village restaurant. Not in the way of a man who had aged. In the way of a man who had put something down that he'd been holding upright for a long time and the effort of it was now visible.Sit down, he said.They sat. Richard stayed standing.He looked at the envelope.I've been deciding how to begin this for tw

Chapter Twenty-Four: "The Name"

ZARAMonday, 11:47pmSix blocks. Neither of them said anything.Richard was in a car somewhere behind them. His idea. Separation. Three people leaving together told a different story than two people on foot.Her bag on her shoulder. Inside it thirty pages and her mother's handwriting. Your father asked me to.She'd been keeping herself moving since the hotel room. Making herself look at the street ahead and think about where they were going and not think about page fourteen and not think about her mother packing quietly in the night and not think about a man she'd never met who had moved money through three holding companies between 2001 and 2003 and died before she was born.She was doing it successfully.Then Callum's hand found hers.Not saying anything. Just there.She let herself stop.She stood on the pavement in November with the city going past and let herself feel the weight of it for exactly thirty seconds.Her father had been in it. Not peripherally. As a principal.Her mot

Chapter Twenty-Five: "Contingency"

CALLUMTuesday, 9:14amGeoffrey Marsh had an office on the thirty-eighth floor of a building in the Financial District that he had occupied for eleven years.Callum had been in that office many times. Quarterly meetings. Drinks after difficult quarters. Conversations that started professional and ended personal because thirty years of knowing someone does that eventually.He knocked once. Opened the door without waiting.Geoffrey was at his desk but not working.The document in front of him was closed. His hands were folded on top of it. On the corner of the desk a glass of whisky, barely touched, at nine in the morning. His lawyer's business card was beside the phone with a number written on it in fresh ink.He didn't look up immediately.When he did there was nothing in his face that resembled surprise.Sit down, he said.Callum sat.You found the document, Geoffrey said.Yes.Richard brought it.Yes.Geoffrey nodded once.How much does she know, he said.Everything.He absorbed tha

Chapter Twenty-Six: "Contingency Two"

ZARATuesday, 10:31amHer mother called at 10:31.Not from the neighbour's number. From her own phone. Which meant she'd gone back to the house.Zara answered before the second ring.Mum. Why are you on your own phone.Silence for a moment.Someone left something, her mother said. At the house. This morning. Before I got here. On the doorstep.Zara stood up from the hotel lobby chair.What is it, she said.An envelope, her mother said. My name on the front. No stamp. No return address.Zara looked at the window. Lexington Avenue going about its Tuesday.Don't open it, she said.I already opened it, her mother said.Zara closed her eyes for one second.What's inside, she said.A document, her mother said. And a note. The note says. She stopped. It says if I don't sign the document and return it to an address in New Jersey by five o'clock today they'll release everything. All of it. Your name. My name. The custodial arrangement. Everything connected to your father.Zara crossed the lobb

Chapter Twenty-Seven: "Four Hours"

ZARATuesday, 11:18amMarcus Webb was at a standing desk near the window when they found him. Headphones around his neck. A coffee going cold beside his laptop.He saw them coming from across the room.He didn't try to leave.Zara pulled a chair from the nearest empty desk and sat across from him. Callum stayed standing slightly behind her.You know who we are?Yes.We're not here about what you processed. We know you processed scheduling overrides using credentials that weren't yours to initiate. We know you didn't know what they were for. We know you're a conduit not a source.Marcus looked at his laptop screen. His coffee cup. His hands on the desk.We need one thing. The person who gave you the instructions directly. Not through the system. The person who spoke to you.A pause.Not a short one.If I give you a name, what happens to me?We're going to the regulator today, Callum said. Your name is already in the access logs. How it reads depends on what you do in the next four hour

Chapter Twenty-Eight: "Atlanta"

ZARATuesday, 3:47pmThey landed in forty-one minutes of silence.She'd spent the flight looking at her phone without looking at it. The screen dark. Her reflection in it. Outside the window Georgia coming up below them, flat and brown and November-quiet.Callum was beside her. Not touching. Present.When the wheels hit the tarmac she turned her phone on.One message. From the neighbour's number.Your mother called me from her house. She said to tell you she's alright. She said not to come.She showed it to Callum.She's alright. As of when.Thirty minutes ago. Before we landed.She looked out the window. The Atlanta tarmac. Ground crew moving around the plane in thin winter light.She said not to come which means someone is there. She's trying to protect us from walking into it.Or she's been told to say that.Both things could be true.They were off the plane in four minutes. Through the terminal in six. Into a car in nine.She gave the driver the address.Twenty-two minutes from th

Chapter Twenty-Nine: "After"

ZARATuesday, 6:14pmThe man left at six.No drama in it. He stood, picked up his jacket, nodded once to Elena, once to Callum, and looked at Zara for a moment longer than the others.Your father would have liked you, he said.Then he was gone.The front door closed.The three of them stood in the small warm room with the candle burning down on the windowsill and the photographs on the mantel and the particular silence of a space that has just had something very large removed from it.Callum looked at Zara.She looked at her mother.Elena was looking at the door.Then she turned toward the kitchen.I'll make tea, she said.The kitchen was small and yellow-walled and had a table with four chairs, one of which had a cushion tied to it with string that had been retied so many times the knot was enormous. There was a window above the sink that looked onto a back garden going brown in November. A calendar on the wall. A plant on the counter that was doing its best.Zara sat at the table.C

Chapter Thirty: "The Morning After"

ZARAWednesday, 7:44amShe woke up to something burning.The spare room had a quilt with a pattern she didn't recognise and a window that looked onto the November garden. She lay there for a moment. A cabinet opening in the kitchen. Something set down too carefully. Then nothing.She got up.The kitchen doorway.Callum was at the stove.Her mother was sitting at the table with both hands around a cup of coffee. Not helping.The heat was wrong. She could see it from across the room.She crossed to the stove. Turned it down without saying anything.He looked at the dial.Lower than I thought.Lower than you always think.Her mother made a sound. Zara looked at her.Elena was looking at her cup. The corner of her mouth doing something.The eggs were salvageable. Just. Zara moved them slowly, the way Mae had shown her, and they came back from the edge and became something that could be eaten.She put them on three plates.They sat at the table. The yellow kitchen. The enormous knotted cus

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