The Wanderlust / Chapter 3 / 15

Chapter 3 - What the Files ShowI didn't go home that night. I checked into a hotel eleven minutes from the marina, ordered room service I didn't eat, and spread the three authorization forms across the bed like evidence in a case I hadn't yet decided to prosecute.

By midnight, I had also pulled up every financial statement I could access from my laptop — the joint accounts, the estate account my father's attorney had helped me set up, the separate account I'd opened after the funeral specifically to keep his money untouched by anything related to my marriage, some instinct I hadn't examined too closely at the time.

That instinct, it turned out, had been correct.

There were four withdrawals from the estate maintenance account over the past five months, each one just under the threshold that would have triggered an automatic notification to my phone — a threshold Marcus knew, because he was the one who had helped me set up the account's alert settings, back when I still thought of him as someone helping me survive the worst year of my life rather than someone quietly circling it.

Four withdrawals. Combined, just over thirty-one thousand dollars.

I called my father's attorney at eight the next morning, a soft-spoken, precise woman named Patricia Voss who had handled Kessler family matters since before I was born. I read her the numbers. I described the forged authorization. I could hear her go very still on the other end of the line.

"Diane," she said, "I need you to gather every document you have — the marina forms, the account statements, anything with a signature on it — and bring them to my office today. Don't confront him again until we've reviewed everything. Not because you're wrong to be angry. Because you need to be right, on paper, before this goes any further."

"Is this a police matter?" I asked, and my voice cracked slightly on the word police, the first time I'd allowed myself to say it out loud.

"It could be," Patricia said carefully. "Forging a signature on estate documents, using estate funds without authorization — those aren't gray areas, legally. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's see exactly what we're dealing with first."

I spent the next three hours at her office, watching her go through the paperwork with the calm, unhurried precision of someone who had clearly done this before, for other women, in other conference rooms, with other men's names circled in red pen.

"Here," she said finally, tapping one of the withdrawal records. "This one — eleven thousand, in March — it was wired to an account called Ansley Creative Consulting."

I looked at the name for a long moment before it fully registered. "Brooke's company."

"Do you know what that payment was for?"

"I have no idea," I said. "I've never heard of Ansley Creative Consulting. I've never approved any payment to her, personal or professional."

Patricia made a note, her pen moving in small, efficient strokes. "We'll need documentation. Invoices, contracts, anything that would explain a business justification — if one exists. If it doesn't, this isn't just a marital problem, Diane. This is theft from an estate you're the sole beneficiary of."

I sat with that word — theft — turning it over, trying to make it fit the man I had made coffee for every morning for eleven years, the man who had held my hand at my father's funeral and cried real tears, or tears that had seemed real at the time.

"I want to understand something," I said. "Not why he did it. I think I already understand why — Brooke, the affair, wanting to feel young and reckless and unaccountable to anyone. I want to understand how long. How long has this actually been happening, underneath everything I thought was our life?"

Patricia looked at me with something between sympathy and professional caution. "That," she said, "is exactly what we're going to find out. But I want you prepared. Sometimes when you start pulling one thread, Diane, the whole sweater comes apart faster than you expect."

I thought about the Wanderlust, rocking gently at her mooring, still wearing the ghost of my father's hands in every polished rail and brass fitting. I thought about Brooke's caption — she's basically ours now — and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful in its coldness, that I was no longer simply trying to save my marriage.