Chapter Three
The Gift Receipts
Tilda had never liked Jeremy’s home office, although visitors often admired it.
The room had been designed to suggest judgment, stability, and money.
Dark shelves held financial books arranged more for weight than reading.
Framed certificates hung behind the desk.
A photograph of Jeremy shaking hands with a former mayor sat angled toward whichever client had been invited to feel fortunate.
On the morning after Tilda saw him outside Lila Hollis’s school, Jeremy left for a charity breakfast.
“Don’t hold lunch for me,” he said, checking his reflection in the hall mirror.
“I had not planned to.”
Jeremy looked at her through the glass. “That sounded almost like rebellion.”
“Perhaps the season is changing me.”
“Christmas does bring out strange impulses.” He smiled, smoothed his tie, and kissed the air near her temple. “Don’t exhaust yourself with the party lists. I can always ask someone at the office to help.”
Tilda looked at the stack of envelopes waiting near the stairs. “You’ve never trusted anyone at the office with the personal touches.”
“I trust you.”
The sentence remained in the hall after he left, all but useless.
Tilda waited until the garage door had closed and the house had returned to its obedient quiet. She carried a cup of coffee into Jeremy’s office, placed it on a coaster he had bought for clients, and sat behind his desk.
The top drawers offered the usual theater of innocence.
They held pens, notepads, business cards, a silver letter opener with his initials, and receipts from restaurants where Jeremy had entertained clients whose names Tilda recognized from Christmas cards.
Beneath one folder sat an envelope from a jeweler on King Street.
Tilda opened it.
Inside was a receipt for a gold pendant purchased two weeks earlier. The line below the price noted engraving at no charge.
The engraving read, “For Lila, from Dad.”
Tilda placed the receipt flat on the desk and photographed it.
A second envelope contained gift receipts from a luxury boutique. Cashmere gloves. A silk scarf. A red wool coat in a size Tilda had never worn. Another folded slip showed a purchase from a stationery shop, twelve boxed Christmas cards with a custom return address printed on the back flap.
Claire HollisLila HollisJuniper LaneSavannah, Georgia
Tilda stared at the printed address. Jeremy had paid for Claire’s Christmas cards. He had paid for the red coat. He had paid for the pendant that called him Dad in gold small enough to rest against a girl’s throat.
The Christmas folder gained four new photographs.
A locked file cabinet stood beside the shelves.
Jeremy’s keys were not in the room. That was too obvious, and Jeremy rarely made the same mistake twice.
Tilda turned instead to the narrow records closet behind the desk, a space he used for older client boxes and household files he considered too boring to hide properly.
The closet door opened with a soft click.
Inside, cardboard archive boxes stood in neat rows, each labeled by year. Jeremy believed labels made things respectable. Tilda chose the box from the year Claire left Charleston and carried it to the desk.
The first folders concerned office leases, payroll records, staff holiday bonuses, and health plans. Near the back, behind a tax folder, lay Claire Hollis’s employee file.
Tilda opened it carefully.
Claire’s application listed Jeremy as supervisor. Her resignation letter was brief and grateful. A medical leave form appeared beneath it, followed by a handwritten note from Jeremy authorizing “temporary housing assistance.” The emergency contact line on one document had been changed in ink.
The name Jeremy Webb had been written there.
The front door opened downstairs.
Tilda moved without deciding to move. Claire’s file went under her cardigan. The box lid slipped sideways as she lifted it, and several folders slid onto the rug. Footsteps crossed the hall below, slow and familiar.
“Tilda?” Jeremy called.
The office door stood open. The desk was not tidy enough. The jeweler’s receipt lay near the keyboard.
Tilda snatched the receipt and stepped into the records closet, pulling the door almost closed behind her. A narrow gap remained, just wide enough to show the lower half of the office.
Jeremy entered speaking into his phone.
Tilda took out her phone, started recording, and held it against the employee file.
“No, Claire, listen to me. She only saw a card. A card means nothing without context, and Tilda has always been bad at confrontation.”
Tilda held the employee file against her chest.
Jeremy crossed to the desk. His shoes stopped inches from the fallen folders.
“I’m aware Lila is upset,” he said. “She’s fifteen. Fifteen-year-olds confuse drama with courage.”
Claire spoke on the other end, her voice too faint for words.
“That’s not fair,” Jeremy said. “I have protected both of you for years, and I will not be punished because Lila decided Christmas suddenly required honesty. I’ll handle Tilda before New Year’s.”
The room went quiet except for the small private sounds of Jeremy breathing through irritation.
“Do not send another message,” he said. “You already frightened her enough to make her curious.”
Tilda looked down at the file in her arms. So Claire had sent the warning.
Jeremy moved around the desk. Paper shifted. A drawer opened. Tilda imagined him finding the missing receipt in her hand, the box out of place, the closet door not quite shut. Her fingers pressed into the folder until the cardboard bent.
“The party will go ahead,” Jeremy said. “I need the clients settled before year-end, and I need Arthur calm. After that, everything becomes simpler.”
Another pause followed.
“No, Claire. I am not choosing this conversation again. I chose the only workable arrangement a long time ago.”
The call ended.
Jeremy remained in the office. Tilda could see the cuff of his trousers, the shine of one shoe, and the dark line of a folder in his hand. He bent, gathered the fallen papers from the rug, and returned them to the box. For one awful second, his hand rested on the closet door.
A message chimed on his phone.
Jeremy moved away to read it. “For God’s sake,” he murmured.
The office emptied a moment later. His footsteps retreated toward the hall, and the front door closed.
Tilda stayed inside the closet. At last she stepped out, carrying Claire’s file, the jeweler’s receipt, and the smell of dust from old paper.
The box sat back on the desk, not perfectly aligned. Jeremy had noticed disorder, but not enough. That was his weakness. He saw disturbance as something women caused, not something they understood.
Tilda photographed Claire’s file page by page. The altered emergency contact line. The housing note. The resignation letter. The payroll record from the month before Claire supposedly left town with nothing.
At the bottom of the box, beneath a folder marked Client Holiday, Tilda found a second packet of Christmas cards. The front photograph showed Claire and Lila in front of the red-ornamented tree. Jeremy did not appear in this version. The back flap carried the Juniper Lane address.
A small sticky note had been attached to the top card in Jeremy’s handwriting.
The note read, “Use this version for school families. Do not send to Charleston list.”
Tilda sat down slowly.
That was the first instruction he had written plainly. Not affection. Not apology. Logistics. Jeremy had divided Christmas into audiences, selecting the version of his life each group was allowed to receive.
Her phone buzzed with a message from Marnie.
You said you would explain later. It’s later enough.
Tilda looked at the papers spread across Jeremy’s desk.
Soon, she wrote. I need you to be available tonight.
Marnie answered at once.
For you or for bail?
Despite the closed room and the file in her hand, Tilda smiled.
For judgment, Tilda replied.
That evening, Jeremy came home with a wrapped package from the jeweler. He left it on the hall table while he removed his coat.
“For Arthur’s wife,” he said before Tilda asked. “Apparently I’m expected to know what women like.”
Tilda glanced at the box, its ribbon neat and expensive. “How brave of everyone.”
Jeremy smiled, relieved to find her amusing again. “You may mock, but I survive December only because of charm and panic.”
“Whose panic?”
“Everyone’s but mine, ideally.”
During dinner, Jeremy described the charity breakfast and the fragility of clients near the holidays. Tilda listened. She asked appropriate questions. She passed the salt.
Across from her, Jeremy wore the face of a devoted husband who had hidden a gold pendant for another man’s daughter, except that the girl was not another man’s daughter at all.
After he went upstairs, Tilda opened the drawer where she kept wrapping paper. The package from the jeweler had disappeared from the hall table, but the receipt in her folder remained.
By midnight, the Christmas folder contained the burned card, the concert program, the school video, the blocked message, the gift receipts, Claire’s employee file, the call recording, and the second set of Christmas cards.
Tilda wrote a new label on the front of a plain manila envelope.
Jeremy Webb.
Private.
The irony pleased her less than it should have. She placed the evidence inside anyway.
At the bottom of the pile, the sticky note waited with its small, careful instruction.
The instruction still read, “Do not send to Charleston list.”
Tilda read it once more before turning off the desk lamp.
Jeremy had been sorting his life by mailing list.
Now Tilda had begun sorting it by evidence.