Chapter 3
COSTA RICA
The rental car smells like someone chain-smoked in it for a decade and then tried to fix the problem with a pine-scented air freshener, which means it actually smells like cigarettes and a car wash, which means I’m breathing through my mouth for three hours as Jonah drives us out of Juan Santamaría Airport and into San José traffic that moves like living chaos — lurching, stopping, everyone honking at once.
“You okay?” he asks, glancing over.
“The car smells like an ashtray married a Christmas tree.”
“I requested non-smoking.”
“You were lied to.”
He almost smiles. Almost. His mouth does the thing where it twitches at one corner and then decides against it, and I look out the window because I don’t need to be cataloging the micro-expressions of my private investigator while we’re on our way to prove my husband faked his death.
The hotel is small. Not charming-small, not boutique-small — cheap-small.
Two stories, stucco exterior the color of old teeth, a courtyard with a fountain that isn’t running.
Jonah booked two rooms because we’re professionals and this is a professional arrangement and I am paying this man four hundred dollars a day plus expenses out of the forty-five thousand dollars that represents my entire net worth.
He hasn’t said so, but I know this is not where he would have chosen to stay, and that he’s accepting a shitty hotel room because I don’t have a lot of money.
I can hear myself calculating the burn rate: flights, car, hotel, Jonah’s fee, food. I have maybe three weeks of runway before the checking account goes critical. Three weeks to find proof that my husband is alive and steal back what he stole from me.
No pressure.
Our rooms share a wall. I discover this immediately, because I can hear Jonah on the other side of it — the creak of bedsprings as he sits down, the muffled snap of his laptop opening, the low rumble of his voice when he makes a call.
I can’t hear the words, just the rhythm — steady, professional, punctuated by pauses where he’s listening or typing.
I press my palm against the wall for one stupid second and then pull it away and unpack my bag, which takes four minutes because I packed like a woman on a mission, not a vacation.
Three changes of clothes. The documents. A phone charger. Done.
I sit on the bed. It’s hard. The sheets smell like industrial bleach, which is actually better than the rental car.
Through the wall, Jonah laughs at something.
Not a polite laugh — a real one, short and surprised, like something caught him off guard.
The sound travels through the stucco like it’s nothing, like the wall between us is a suggestion rather than a boundary, and I lie back on the hard mattress and stare at the ceiling fan rotating slowly above me and think about Drew.
Drew who is somewhere in this country. Drew who is breathing and walking and checking his email and eating dinner while I sleep in a hotel room that costs sixty-two dollars a night because it’s all I can afford. Because he took everything.
The fan clicks with every rotation. Click. Click. Click.
I don’t sleep. I shower in a bathroom the size of a closet and change into the one outfit I brought that says responsible widow handling estate business — dark pants, a blouse that’s been rolled in my carry-on for six hours and looks like it, which I try to fix with the tiny iron clamped to the wall.
The iron spits rust-colored water onto the sleeve.
I stare at the stain, and for one white-hot second I want to scream, because I used to have a walk-in closet and a dry cleaner who knew my name and now I’m standing in a sixty-two-dollar hotel room pressing dirty water into a blouse I need to wear to a bank where I’m going to pretend my husband is dead.
I don’t scream. I button the blouse so the stain is hidden under the cuff and I go downstairs.
Jonah is in the lobby, sitting in a plastic chair, laptop open on his knees.
He’s wearing the same button-down from yesterday, sleeves rolled, glasses on.
He’s reading something on the screen that’s making him push the glasses up his nose with one finger — that gesture, the absentminded nudge — and I notice the way his forearm flexes when he does it, the tendons under the skin, and I notice that I’m noticing.
“Morning,” I say.
He looks up. Scans me — not checking me out, reading me, the way he reads documents. “You didn’t sleep.”
“Neither did you.”
“I slept two hours. That’s standard for me on the first night of fieldwork.
” He closes the laptop. “I confirmed the bank branch. Banco Nacional, the Paseo Colón location. The account that received the wire transfers is registered there. I’ve mapped the route — it’s eleven minutes in the car, fourteen in current traffic. ”
“You checked current traffic.”
“I check everything.” He stands and tucks the laptop into a bag.
“Here’s how today works. You walk in as the widow.
You bring the death certificate, marriage certificate, and your passport.
You’re there to inquire about your deceased husband’s financial accounts as part of estate administration.
You’re grieving, you’re confused, you need help understanding what assets exist.”
“I need to play the helpless widow.”
“You need to play the widow who has every legal right to ask questions about her husband’s accounts. Which you do. Costa Rican banking regulations allow a surviving spouse to make inquiries with proper documentation. You’re not doing anything wrong.”
“I know I’m not doing anything wrong. My husband emptied our accounts and faked his death. I’m a long way past worrying about wrong.”
He watches me for a beat. Something shifts behind the glasses — something I can’t quite name and don’t have time to decode. Then he picks up the car keys.
“Let’s go,” he says.
The rental car still smells like an ashtray married a Christmas tree. I don’t breathe through my mouth this time. I’ve got bigger problems than air quality.
The bank is cold. Air-conditioned to the point of aggression, like the building itself is trying to make you uncomfortable so you’ll leave faster.
I don’t plan to leave fast. I plan to sit in this plastic chair across from the bank manager’s desk and smile and be sad and find out if my dead husband walked through these doors last week.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I say. My voice catches on the right word — seeing — a tiny crack that sounds like grief and is actually adrenaline.
The bank manager, a man named Se?or Delgado with kind eyes and a mustache that reminds me of my high school Spanish teacher, leans forward with the expression of someone who handles difficult conversations professionally but still has a heart.
“Of course, Se?ora. Please, how can I help?”
I pull out the documents. Lay them on the desk like cards in a poker game I intend to win. Death certificate. Marriage certificate. Passport. Three pieces of paper that tell the official story: Drew Calloway died in a boating accident, I am his wife, and I am who I say I am.
“My husband recently passed away.” I let the sentence land.
Let Delgado absorb it. His face does the thing people’s faces do — the softening, the automatic empathy.
“I’m trying to understand his financial affairs as part of settling the estate.
I believe he may have had an account at this institution, and I need to know what assets exist.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” he says, and I nod and press my lips together and think about Drew on a beach somewhere drinking something cold while I sit in this frozen bank playing a widow. “May I see the documents?”
I slide them across. He examines each one, taking his time with the death certificate, holding it at an angle like the light might reveal something the text doesn’t.
Then he turns to his computer and types.
I watch his face instead of the screen, because his face is going to tell me the truth before his mouth does.
He types. He scrolls. He frowns. He types something else.
The frown deepens.
“Se?ora Calloway,” he says, and his voice has changed — the warmth is still there but it’s been joined by something cautious, something careful, something that tells me whatever is on that screen isn’t what either of us expected.
“I do see an account registered with identifying information that matches what you’ve provided. ”
My heart is pounding. I can feel it in my wrists, my throat, behind my eyes. I keep my face composed. I am a widow. I am grieving. I am confused and sad and I just need help.
“However.” He pauses. Adjusts his chair. Looks at the screen again like he’s hoping it’s changed. “You are not listed as a co-signer or authorized party on this account.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, and I don’t have to fake the confusion because even though I expected this, hearing it still hits like a slap. Not a co-signer on my own husband’s account. Not authorized. Not included. Not even a footnote.
“Additionally…” Delgado trails off. He’s looking at the screen with an expression I can only describe as diplomatic alarm. “Se?ora, I want to be transparent with you because you’ve come a long way and you’re clearly dealing with a great deal. But I’m not certain your husband is the account holder.”
“What do you mean?”
“The owner of this account.” He chooses his words like he’s placing tiles on a board. “Was in this branch last week.”
The air conditioning hums. Somewhere behind me, a phone rings at another desk. A woman laughs. Normal sounds. Bank sounds. The sounds of a world that hasn’t just tilted on its axis.
“Last week,” I repeat.
“Yes, ma’am. The account holder conducted a transaction in person.
Here. At this branch.” He looks at me with those kind eyes, and I can see the gears turning — the death certificate on his desk, the living man in his system, the widow in his chair who doesn’t look like she’s falling apart but whose knuckles have gone white against the armrests.
“I’m sorry. I realize this must be very confusing. ”
Confusing. That’s the word he lands on. Confusing.
I pick up the documents. I slide them back into the folder with hands that are steady — perfectly, terrifyingly steady — and I stand. My legs hold. My face holds. Everything holds.
“Thank you,” I say. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“Se?ora, if there’s been some kind of misunderstanding, I’d encourage you to speak with — “
“Thank you,” I say again, and I mean it.
I mean it more than he could possibly know, because this man just confirmed that my husband is alive, and he did it with kind eyes and careful words, and now I have it.
I know. The suspicion, the spreadsheets, the inconsistencies — all of it just collapsed into a single, clean fact. Drew is alive.
I walk out of the bank and the heat hits me like walking into a wall. San José heat, thick and close and real, nothing like the artificial freeze of the lobby. Jonah is leaning against the rental car across the street, arms crossed, watching the bank entrance. He straightens when he sees me.
I cross the street. I stop in front of him. His eyes are searching my face, reading me the way he reads everything — fast, thorough, looking for the thing that doesn’t fit.
“He’s alive,” I say. “The bank confirmed it. The account holder was in the branch last week.”
My voice is flat. Not shaking, not breaking, not wavering. Flat. Like I’m reading a weather report. Like I’m telling him the time.
Jonah doesn’t say I’m sorry. He doesn’t say are you okay. He doesn’t reach for me or soften his expression or do any of the things that normal people do when someone confirms that their life has been detonated by the person who was supposed to protect it.
He opens the car door.
“Then we find the address,” he says.
I get in the car. The door shuts. The ashtray-Christmas-tree smell wraps around me like an old acquaintance. Through the windshield, the bank sits there — beige, ordinary, a building that just confirmed my husband is a liar and a thief and alive.
Something is hardening inside my chest. Not breaking — I’m past breaking.
Hardening. Calcifying. Turning into something dense and cold and useful.
The grief I carried for three weeks — the real grief, the kind that made me lie on the bathroom floor at 2 a.m. and sob until my ribs ached — that grief was for a man who died.
That man doesn’t exist. The man who exists is tanned and relaxed and walking into banks in Costa Rica while I wear a blouse with a dirty water stain and count every dollar.
Jonah starts the car. He doesn’t ask where to. He knows the answer is forward.
I look at the bank one more time in the side mirror as we pull away.
He’s alive. And he has no idea I’m here.