Chapter 3
Nathan Teague's office sits on the fourth floor of a renovated brick building downtown, the kind with exposed beams and good coffee and no nameplate on the door, just a number. I expected a man in a van. I should've known Helene doesn't refer people to men in vans.
He stands when I come in, and the first thing I notice, before the office, before anything, is that he fills the room without trying.
He's tall, broad through the shoulders in a way his dark shirt doesn't apologize for, dark hair gone silver at the temples, and a face that's clearly decided what it thinks of most things.
There's a faint scar at the edge of one eyebrow.
His eyes are brown and steady, and they settle on me like he's already reading the trip backward the way I did.
"Mrs. Haines." He puts out his hand. "Nathan Teague."
"Gillian," I say. "I'm reclaiming my first name. Long story."
"They usually are." His handshake is warm and brief, and his hand is large enough that I notice it, the calluses at the base of his fingers, the controlled grip of a man who knows exactly how much pressure he could use and chooses less.
He lets go before I want him to, which tells me something about him too, and I file that away with some irritation.
I didn't come here to notice a man's hands.
I came here because my husband is a thief.
"Sit," he says. "Helene gave me the outline. I'd rather hear it from you. Start where it actually starts, not where it's tidiest."
So I do. The short-term garage. The graphite suitcase.
The silver Lexus and the kiss. The canceled flight he sold me as turbulence.
And while I talk, he does something almost nobody does.
He listens without arranging his face into sympathy.
He doesn't tilt his head. He doesn't say I'm so sorry in the soft voice people use once they've decided you're fragile.
He takes notes in small, precise handwriting, and he asks me three questions, and every one is sharper than anything I asked myself last night.
"You book all the travel," he says. "Personal, the rewards accounts. Does any of that touch his employer's systems, or only the household side?"
"Only ours. His corporate card and his work logins are Perrin Holt's. I've never gone in. Helene told me not to."
"Helene's right, and you should keep being able to say that sentence out loud and have it be true.
" He sets the pen down. "Here's what I can do and what I can't, and I'd rather disappoint you in the first meeting than the fourth.
I don't hack. I don't pull private airline records out of a back room.
Anyone who tells you they can is either lying or about to make you part of a crime.
What I do is build the pattern from what's lawfully reachable.
Public filings, business records, the things people leave in the open because they assume nobody's looking.
Then I preserve it so it survives a lawyer, a company, and a man who's going to call you unstable. "
The word goes into me like a splinter. "He's going to call me unstable."
"Every time. It's the cheapest move there is, and it works often enough that they keep it in the drawer.
You make it fail by staying exactly as calm as you are right now and letting me hand you proof a stranger would believe.
" He looks at me, level. "The affair is the part that hurts. The fraud is the part that wins. If you blow up at him in week two because you’re in pain, I can't put the win back together. So I have to ask. Can you stay strong?"
"I drove him home from the airport after I watched him kiss her," I say. "Made small talk about his flight the whole way. I'm not going to come apart in week two."
He's quiet a second, and something in his face shifts, not softening exactly, more like he's revising an estimate upward. "No," he says. "I don't think you are."
It shouldn't feel good, being seen that clearly by a man I met twenty minutes ago. It does anyway. He looked at me and found something he hadn't expected, and I feel it land low in my body, somewhere that has nothing to do with travel fraud, and I sit up straighter and pretend it didn't happen.
It occurs to me, sitting across from him, that competence is its own kind of good-looking.
Mark is handsome in the maintained corporate way, gym without joy, expensive haircut, pale blue shirts chosen to read trustworthy.
Nathan isn't trying to read as anything.
He just is what he is, a man who's very good at a difficult job and has stopped needing to prove it, and there's something about the economy of him, the way he doesn't waste a movement or a word, that I keep getting caught on.
He notices me noticing. He doesn't make it weird.
He just holds my eyes a beat longer than a man building a fraud case strictly needs to, and lets me look, and goes back to work.
"Tell me about the trips that went nowhere," he says.
I take out my phone. I don't log into anything I shouldn't.
But I have my own records, my own calendar, my own notes in my own hand, and that turns out to be plenty.
I walk him through the gray squares. Denver with a hotel and no flight.
Atlanta with a rental returned to an airport eleven miles from our house.
The day-use room up the interstate. He watches the screen, then he watches me, and when I get to my own handwriting, picked him up at 6, made soup, he stops me.
"That's the part he used the most," he says quietly.
"Not the card. You. A wife who confirms the trip out loud to her friends, who sends the safe-travels text, who picks him up at arrivals.
That's a better alibi than any receipt, because it's free and it loves him.
" He holds my eyes. "He didn't just lie to you.
He took the part of you that was real and put it to work for him.
I want you to know I see the difference. "
I haven't cried about any of this. I don't cry now. But something happens in my throat, and I have to look at the brick across the street for a moment before I can answer.
"How long will it take?"
"Faster than you'd think. Confident people get careless.
" He slides a single sheet across the desk.
A retainer, plain language, a number that makes me grateful I have my own business and my own account Mark never managed.
"I'll need your written authorization, the household records you legally hold, and about two weeks. You keep living your normal life. Don’t act any different. Let him think it's working."
"Helene said the same thing."
"Helene and I agree about most men." The corner of his mouth moves, the restrained version of a smile, and I want the whole thing and am annoyed about it.
"One rule, and it's mine, not Helene's. You set the scope.
You decide how far this goes, what gets shown, and when.
I find it. I don't fire it. The day this turns into my revenge instead of your decision, I've done the job wrong. "
"So I have to tell you what I want," I say.
"You have to tell me what you want." He says it like the simplest thing in the world, and it isn't, not for me.
"Most people come in here wanting him to suffer, which I understand, and which is a terrible north star because it never ends.
So I ask a better question. When this is over, what does your life look like? Aim me at that."
I open my mouth to answer and find I don't have one ready.
I've spent sixteen years building other people's arrivals, and somewhere in there I stopped booking anything for myself.
I know exactly what Mark would want me to want, which is quiet, which is for me to take a settlement and a story we can both live with.
I know what my mother would want me to want, which is to keep the house and my dignity in that order.
"I don't know yet," I admit. "Nobody's asked me that in a long time. I'm usually the one making sure everyone else lands somewhere soft."
Something moves through his expression, brief and warm, gone before I can hold it.
"Then that's the first thing this buys you," he says.
"Time to figure out where you want to land.
You don't have to answer today. But I want you to notice that you flinched at the question.
That tells me he's been training you out of wanting things for a while. "
He's not wrong, and I resent how easily he saw it, and underneath the resentment is something that feels alarmingly like relief.
I sign. His pen is heavier than mine, a real weight in the hand, and I notice that too.
He walks me to the door. "I'll call you tomorrow.
I'm starting with the Atlanta rental, the eleven-mile return.
People guard the big lies and leave the small true things lying around.
" He pauses with his hand near the frame, not touching it.
"You did the hard part already. You stayed calm and you kept the records.
Most people bring me a feeling. You brought me a case. "
I drive home, make dinner, and ask Mark about his day. He tells me a long story about a difficult client, and I nod along like I always have. But all evening I keep thinking about a man downtown with a heavy pen who looked at me like I was worth taking seriously.
Nathan calls the next afternoon, exactly when he said he would. "The Atlanta rental. Returned the same night it was picked up. He never went to Atlanta at all." A beat. "And it's not the only one, Gillian. There's a route here. I can see where it starts."