Now? It was just evidence.
A sharp knock sounded at my front door.
I set down my mug, walked through the hallway, and checked the security monitor by the entryway.
It wasn’t Shawn. It wasn’t Evelyn.
It was Anthony.
He was standing on the porch, his shoulders slumped, wearing the same dirt-stained work shirt from the evening before. He looked like he hadn’t slept for a single second. His jaw was covered in dark stubble, and his hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his canvas jacket.
I unbolted the door and pulled it open.
“Anthony,” I said quietly.
He looked at me, his eyes bloodshot, his face gray. “Can I come in, Aaron? Please.”
I stepped aside and held the door open. “Of course. Have you eaten?”
“I can’t stomach anything,” he muttered, walking into the foyer and wiping his boots carefully on the mat. “I’ve been driving around the industrial park since three in the morning. Just… sitting in my truck, looking at the water tower.”
I led him into the kitchen. He sat down heavily on the stool Maya had occupied the day before. The strawberry cake had been wiped from the counters, the floor scrubbed spotless, but the ghost of yesterday’s confrontation still hung in the air.
“Did you talk to her?” I asked, pouring him a fresh cup of coffee and setting it in front of him.
Anthony let out a dry, cracked laugh. “Talk to her? I walked into our house last night, and she was waiting in the foyer with her mother. They had a script prepared, Aaron. Word for word.”
He wrapped his calloused hands around the warm ceramic mug, staring into the dark liquid.
“They told me you were suffering from postpartum depression that never healed,” Anthony said, his voice trembling with a mixture of disbelief and fury. “Evelyn actually looked me in the eye and said you had developed an obsession with Olivia’s lifestyle. She said you stole our financial statements from Shawn’s desk and altered the numbers on your computer to make Olivia look like a criminal because you couldn’t stand seeing us happy.”
I didn’t flinch. It was textbook Evelyn. Whenever Olivia committed a transgression, the strategy was always to declare the accuser insane.
“And what did Olivia say?” I asked.
“She cried,” Anthony replied, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitched beneath his skin. “She threw herself on the floor, Aaron. Literally grabbed my work boots and begged me to believe her. She swore on her grandmother’s grave that Shawn was the one who gambled away our money on foreign exchange markets, and that she only signed those papers because Shawn threatened to ruin her boutique if she didn’t help him hide it from you.”
I leaned back against the counter, folding my arms. “She blamed Shawn?”
“Instantly,” Anthony said, looking up at me. “She threw her own brother under the bus before I even took off my jacket. And when I asked her to pull up our credit report on her phone to prove the accounts were clean… she pretended to have a panic attack and locked herself in the master bathroom.”
He reached inside his canvas jacket, pulled out a thick manila envelope, and dropped it onto the granite counter with a heavy thud.
“I didn’t wait for her to come out,” Anthony continued, his voice dropping into a register of utter defeat. “I went down to our home office, ripped the lock off her filing cabinet with a crowbar, and took every piece of mail from the last six months.”
I tapped the manila folder with my index finger. “What did you find?”
“Everything you said,” Anthony whispered, a single tear escaping his right eye and cutting a clean path through the drywall dust on his cheek. “Three credit cards I never opened. A loan from a digital lending company with an interest rate of twenty-four percent. And the signature on the application… it looks like mine, Aaron. But it’s not. It’s her handwriting. She used the little flourish on the ‘A’ that I’ve never used in my entire life.”
He buried his face in his hands, his broad shoulders shaking silently.
This was a man who had built houses from the foundation up with his bare hands. He was honest, quiet, and fiercely loyal. To watch him crumble under the weight of his wife’s treachery was agonizing.
“How much is the total debt, Anthony?” I asked softly.
He lifted his head, wiping his face with the back of his sleeve. “Between the drained savings, the forged lines, and the maxed-out store cards? Eighty-two thousand dollars.”
