Chapter 35
Chapter
All of a sudden, Mark Winterson seems to want me around more often. He asks me to sleep over twice during the week—unprecedented!—and on the weekend.
But the more time I spend with him, the more I notice strange things.
On Tuesday, he keeps getting calls all evening.
While we’re eating at a restaurant, he gets a text that makes him visibly agitated, and he walks outside, telling me to stay put and that he’ll be right back.
And when he returns, his eyes are a little red, and there’s some pink in his cheeks.
On Thursday, he starts putting on his clothes at two a.m., and when he notices that I’m awake, he says he needs to go to the office for an emergency—something about how TKCORP’s operations are global, so he’s never really off the clock.
And on Saturday night, we’re lying in bed when his phone starts buzzing on the nightstand, and he hurries out of the room to answer it. Whatever he’s saying sounds urgent, but I can’t quite make out the words.
He comes back and gets dressed in a hurry while I keep my eyes squeezed shut.
His footsteps recede down the stairs, and there’s some distant clattering, the sound of him moving around below.
I hear the word Fuck! distinctly at least once.
There are a few moments of silence, followed by the rumble of the garage door opening and closing.
I pad over to the window in time to see his sleek black Mercedes driving away into the night.
What on earth?
I get up to pace around—there’s no way I can sleep now—and wander down to his office. The first thing I notice is the glow of his monitor. His computer has been left on, screen unlocked, open to his email.
And even though it feels wrong, every strange thing that’s happened lately, all bundled together, propels me across the floor to his keyboard, where I search the words DocuSign Relationship Contract, looking for the same one he sent me.
And oh my God, there are so many! His whole dating history laid out here, relationship contract after relationship contract. Following each one, a few weeks after the first email, there’s a follow-up to the same address—Update to: Relationship Contract.
“Contract terminated in person,” I read out loud. “Irreconcilable differences.”
My fight-or-flight response kicks in, and Greg’s voice pops into my head, saying, Dude seems like he’d talk to you for twenty minutes about the texture of his business cards.
I’m staring at all the names of the women who received this contract before me, and on a whim, I toggle over to the browser to google them.
But…oh my God. In the browser, he’s—I bite my finger to keep from screaming—still logged in to his bank account. There’s the landing page with all his account information, like he left in a frenzy.
My first thought is: Holy fuck that’s a lot of money!
And my second thought is: Huh. That’s weird.
There’s the same amount, recurring, over and over. So many transactions for $9,999. Nearly ten thousand dollars! An eye-popping sum to me, on its own.
A bunch of those transactions are deposits into his account—all from the weirdly named LLCs I stumbled across the other day. GERBO I LLC, GERBO II LLC, GERBO III LLC, on and on. And shortly afterward—a couple days, usually, it looks like—there’s an outgoing wire transfer in the same amount, $9,999.
With trembling hands, I lift my phone to take a picture—and I manage to get it before I hear the garage door rumble below. Shit, shit!
I move the windows on his screen so they’re the way I found them, clear the search from his email, put the computer to sleep, and race up the stairs, diving into bed, heart beating so loud I’m convinced he’ll hear it from the ground floor.
I lie there rigid as Mark Winterson’s footsteps come up the stairs, and as he shuffles around, getting undressed again.
My heart rate has slowed by the time the bed dips and he climbs in.
He edges closer, curling up around me, and tosses an arm over my stomach as I focus on taking slow, steady, sleeping-person-sounding breaths.
Of all times, why does he want to spoon now? Maybe a little corporate malfeasance makes a guy needy.
After a while, I carefully slide out from under his arm, moving slowly so I don’t wake him.
I gather up my clothes, creep downstairs, and get dressed.
And I grab a pen and hover over a block of Post-its on the counter, trying to invent something that will keep him from getting mad or suspecting anything is wrong.
Headed out to an early workout class! See you later.
xoxo,
Ruby
And then I slip out the front door and run to my car, driving home as fast as my 2002 Honda Civic will take me.