All Chapters of Three Nights To Ruin My Husband : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

The sums on the right-hand side of the page were a different size.I noticed it the way you notice a change in the weather before you can say what it is. The earlier entries had been careful, almost modest. Small transfers, spread out, each one the kind of thing a single signature could have hidden. Now the figures grew heavy. The columns seemed to lean under them."How much larger?" I asked."Enough that no one could move it quietly." Adrian turned the page toward me and laid one finger at the head of the column. "Not unless they'd made very sure no one would look.""Could Ash have done that?""That's what I've been asking myself since my accountant called me." He pushed back from the table and stood, walked to the window, and stopped with his back to me. "I've watched Ash for a long time. I know what he's capable of. He's careful with money. He's vain about it. He's greedy, and he's clever in the way greedy men are clever, which is that he knows how to find a gap.""But.""But this

I read my father's letter again that morning, standing at his desk.I knew it by heart. One page in his careful hand, folded in thirds so many times the creases had gone soft as cloth. It was addressed to a title, not a person, at a company that no longer existed. It said, in the stiff, polite way he wrote when he was angry, that his name was not to be used on anyone's behalf without his knowledge, and that he wished to be kept apart from any arrangement made in it.I'd always read it as a warning. I'd never asked who it was meant for, or what happened after he sent it. He'd died, and the questions had stayed in the drawer with the letter, folded small.I put the page down and looked out the study window at the gray garden.Waiting. That was what I'd been doing. I had waited for Ash to explain, for the evening that would finally be good enough, for someone to look at me and say *now you can know.* I had told myself that this time was different, because the person I was waiting on was

He began with the tea."It's gone cold," he said, looking into his cup, and I realized he'd been holding it for a long time without drinking. He set it down. "I always start there when I'm putting something off. I'll try not to.""You can start anywhere.""The beginning's too far back. It was older than both of us when it started." He turned the cup a quarter turn on the table. "I'll start with my father."I didn't move. I'd decided, in the half-second before he spoke, that I wouldn't help him find the words. I would only be there."The families didn't like each other. You know that much. It was the kind of dislike that gets handed down, like a house or a name. Nobody remembered exactly why. By the time I was old enough to understand it, it had become a sort of weather. You dressed for it and didn't ask where it came from.""And your father?""My father believed in doing things properly." His voice softened, very slightly. "That was the whole of his religion. He thought if you built a

She picked up on the fourth ring, which meant she'd looked at the screen first."Elena." Her voice was warm and a little guarded, the way it always was when I called without warning. "Is something wrong?""No. Nothing's wrong." It came out too quickly, and I heard her hear it. "I'm all right. I'm in Dad's study."A pause. "Oh.""I'm not touching anything." I wasn't sure why I'd said it. "I just needed somewhere quiet.""That's all right. He'd have liked you having it." Another pause, softer. "Are you eating?""Yes.""Are you sleeping?""Mostly.""Mostly," she said, and sighed. "You always did say that when you meant no."I smiled, despite everything, and closed my eyes. The old chair creaked as I leaned back. I could smell paper and cold coffee and, very faintly, the mints he used to carry."Mom. I need to ask you something. And I need you to answer it, even if you'd rather not."The line was quiet. I could hear the faint tick of the clock on her kitchen wall, the one that had never k

I should have stopped there. A sensible person would have.I'd found the thing I'd been looking for. I had my father's name beside Adrian's father's, two men standing together, and a date on which the matter was to be put before people who couldn't ignore it. I could have closed the laptop and gone to the kitchen and made myself eat something. I could have let it be enough.But the story had an ending, and I'd already seen its last line: *closed without a finding.* Between those two sentences there was a hole, and I couldn't leave it alone.So I kept going.The next piece was short. A few lines in the back of a column, no byline. It said the referral had not taken place. It didn't say why. It said that the company in question had, in the days before the matter was to have been raised, "taken steps," which the writer left tactfully unspecified. And it said, in a sentence so carefully built I could almost hear the lawyer's hand in it, that "those close to the matter were understood to h