Chapter 2
Saturday morning. Nate is in the shower singing something by The National — off-key, happy, the way he sounds when he doesn't know I'm listening. I'm at the kitchen table with my laptop open and a coffee going cold beside it.
The joint account is on my screen. First time I've logged in since — I check the activity history — March. Four months ago. I've been letting deposits and withdrawals move past like weather I don't track. Trusting the numbers because the numbers have never given me a reason not to trust them.
The balance is fine. That's not the problem.
Nothing unusual. Nothing that shouldn't be there.
But the money I need to find won't be here. It lives in the business accounts — in Gallagher Builds, where $47,200 moved quarterly to a vendor that doesn't exist as a legal entity. Those accounts are separate from our household finances. Nate's name. Nate's company. Nate's books.
My fingers find the table edge. Tap. The rhythm steadies me.
I need to think about this the way I think about a client's case. Clean. Procedural. Step by step.
What I have: an anonymous email. A budget screenshot. Five corporate database searches across six states returning nothing. A vendor name that matches my best friend.
What I need: the full vendor file from Gallagher Builds' accounting system. Invoices. Payment receipts. Bank routing information for the receiving account. Tax filings — specifically, whether a 1099 was issued. Operating agreement, if one exists. Any correspondence between Nate and the vendor.
And I need access. Which means I need to know whether Nate's QuickBooks credentials are still in our shared password manager.
The one I built for us three years ago because he was using "Nate1989!
" for everything — his email, his banking, his QuickBooks, even his gym membership.
I'd set up the vault the same week he incorporated. Organized all his logins. A gift.
The shower turns off. I close the banking tab. Open the Times crossword. Six across: "Cooked the books, in a way." Seven letters. I fill in FALSIFY and almost laugh, but the sound doesn't quite make it out of my throat.
"Morning." Nate appears in the kitchen doorway.
Towel around his waist, hair dripping, that familiar look of a man who slept well and has nothing to hide.
He's thirty-seven and looks it in a way I used to find comforting — the creases around his eyes, the softness gathering at his jaw.
Solid. Domestic. A man who comes home every night and tells you about his day.
"Morning. Coffee's made."
"You're a saint." He crosses the kitchen, kisses the top of my head. Cold water drips from his hair onto my shoulder. He pours his coffee, adds one sugar, stirs with a butter knife because he has never once located a clean spoon in this kitchen.
"What time's Marin coming tonight?"
"Seven, she said."
"Cool. I was thinking we grill. Supposed to be nice out."
"Sounds good."
I watch him drink. Watch his throat move. These are the motions of my life — sugar, butter knife, kiss on the crown of my head. Four years of marriage distilled into a sequence I could perform blindfolded.
I want tonight to happen. I want to sit across from Marin at my own table and watch her eat food from my grill and say my husband's name like it belongs in her mouth.
I want to see how they move around each other in the small space of our back patio.
Whether they touch. Whether they don't touch in a way that's deliberate.
Observation is step one. In any case.
* * *
Monday morning. McKenna & Associates occupies the seventh and eighth floors of a building on Lexington that smells faintly of old carpet and the aggressive lemon of commercial cleaning products.
I've worked here seven years. My office is on the seventh floor, interior — no window, which I requested because windows are distracting and sunlight shifts make my screen difficult to read after 2 PM.
I have a desk, two monitors, a filing cabinet I use for overflow documentation, and a framed print of a Rothko that Nate gave me when I made senior associate.
He said it looked like a balance sheet. I said it looked like two feelings that refused to talk to each other.
The break room is on my way. Damon is there, as he is every Monday at 8:15 — his large frame folded into a plastic chair, phone in one hand, vending machine coffee in the other.
The coffee is dark and terrible. He could use the office pot, which is maintained with religious devotion by someone named Greg from Client Relations. He doesn't.
"Morning, Gallagher."
"Morning." I fill my mug from Greg's pot. Stand across from him. "Quick question."
He doesn't look up. "If it's about the Patel deposition, I sent my notes Friday."
"It's not about Patel."
Something in my voice. He looks up. Damon Wright: forty-two, twelve years with IRS Criminal Investigation before he got tired of GS-13 pay and came to McKenna for private-sector money and the vague promise of better coffee.
He still drinks the vending machine stuff.
"Keeps me angry," he told me once, early on. "Angry accountants find more fraud."
I sit across from him. Set my mug down. Pull out my phone, open the screenshot I saved Friday night.
"Hypothetical," I say.
"No such thing. Not in this office."
"Hypothetical. Someone sends you an anonymous tip. A company on a client's books doesn't exist — no state registration anywhere you check. No website. No phone listing. No evidence of any operations. But the client has been paying them $47,000 per quarter."
I set the phone on the table between us, screen up. The screenshot.
Damon takes it. Looks at the image for ten seconds — I count. His eyes move once, from the highlighted line item to the plain text below it, then back up to the number. $47,200.
"Someone's paying for something that doesn't exist." He sets the phone face-down on the table. Picks up his coffee. Sips. No reaction to the taste, because he never reacts to the taste. "That's either money laundering, embezzlement, or an affair fund. Usually at least two of the three."
"What would you do first?"
"Depends." His eyes are flat and sharp at the same time — twelve years of interviewing people who lied for a living trained his face into something unreadable. "Is the someone a client of ours?"
I pick up my phone. Slide it into my pocket. "It's hypothetical."
He watches me. The break room is filling up now — two associates from the eighth floor come in arguing about something from the weekend. Damon doesn't acknowledge them.
"Hypothetically," he says, "I'd pull the vendor file.
See who authorized the payments, when they started, what documentation exists.
Then I'd check the 1099 — because if they're paying $47K a quarter, that's over the $600 threshold and the company is legally required to file one.
If no 1099 was issued, somebody's committing tax fraud on top of whatever else they're doing. "
"And if you can't access the vendor file through normal channels?"
He looks at me for a long time. Then he picks up his terrible coffee again.
"Then I'd find another way in. Hypothetically."
* * *
My office door is closed. I rarely close it — Damon will have noticed. Let him.
I open the password manager on my personal laptop. Shared family vault. The one I built. Nate's logins are organized by category: banking, business, personal. Under Business: QuickBooks Enterprise — Gallagher Builds.
Last updated: fourteen months ago.
I could stop here. I could decide this isn't my business.
Nate's company, Nate's vendor relationships, Nate's decisions about where his seed funding goes.
I could trust that there's a reasonable explanation — maybe Marin registered in a state I didn't check.
Maybe the database hasn't updated. Maybe the anonymous emailer is wrong.
But I've never once had an anonymous tip be wrong. Not in seven years.
I type the URL. Enter the credentials. Hold my breath for half a second — if he changed the password and didn't update the vault, this ends here.
The dashboard loads.
Gallagher Builds. Revenue: $412,000 (YTD). Operating expenses: $387,000. Payroll for seven employees. And there, under the Vendors tab:
Marin Voss Associates
Vendor since: January 15
Total payments (YTD): $141,600
Payment method: ACH transfer
Routing number: [visible]
Account number: [visible]
January. Not six months ago. Seven. The payments started in January — a full month before Marin moved into the office next door. Before the champagne night. Before the celebration in my kitchen where she clinked my glass and called herself "official."
She was getting paid before she had the space. The office wasn't the beginning. It was the reward.
$141,600 since January 15th.
I click into the invoice history. Four entries. Quarterly. Each for exactly $47,200. The service descriptions are vague in the way that reads professional if you don't know what to look for — and screams fabrication if you do:
Q1: Strategic communications audit and stakeholder implementation
Q2: Brand positioning consultation and market analysis
Q3: Strategic consulting services — ongoing retainer
Q4: Not yet invoiced
No deliverables attached to any invoice. No SOW. No project briefs. No email threads. No meeting notes. Just four invoices, four identical amounts, four ACH transfers to the same account.
I screenshot everything. Vendor profile. Invoice details. Payment confirmations with routing and account numbers visible. Each screenshot saved to 07-11-GALLAGHER with a timestamp.
Then I open a new tab. Bank routing number lookup.
The receiving account routes to a Chase branch in Midtown Manhattan.
I can't see the account holder's name without a court order or a law enforcement subpoena — but I know.
The invoices come from Marin Voss Associates. The account belongs to Marin Voss.
$141,600. Seven months. Four invoices. Zero work product.
My desk phone rings. Internal extension.
"Gallagher."
"Hey." Damon. Flat as ever. "Your hypothetical." A pause. "If it's what I think it is — be careful. Investigating your own is how people lose their license and their job. Both at the same time. You know that."
I do know that. McKenna's ethics policy is three pages long. I helped write two of them.
"It's hypothetical, Damon."
"Sure it is." The sound of terrible coffee being swallowed. "Hypothetically, I'm in my office until seven tonight. If you need a second set of eyes on anything that doesn't exist."
He hangs up.
I sit in my chair. Both monitors glowing blue-white.
The Rothko on the wall — two blocks of color separated by a line so thin you might miss it.
Two things that can't communicate. I've looked at this painting every workday for four years and never thought about what it actually means until right now.
$141,600. Seven months. Zero deliverables. Zero registration. Zero real clients.
Marin is texting me right now — my phone has buzzed twice in the last ten minutes. Probably about Saturday. Probably about how fun it was, how good the burgers were, how we should "do this every week." Warm. Casual. The texture of friendship maintained at exactly the right frequency.
I don't check the texts yet.
I have numbers to follow. Numbers don't lie. They can be hidden, buried, routed through shells and holding companies and offshore accounts designed to obscure. But they don't lie. You just have to be patient enough to find where they went.
I've always been patient.