Chapter 10
Thursday morning. The day.
Nate sleeps beside me. His breathing is steady — the deep, even rhythm of a man who doesn't know today is his last day of not knowing.
I watch the ceiling. Count the seconds between his exhales.
There's a hairline crack in the plaster above the window that I've been meaning to report to building maintenance since February.
I never did. The crack didn't seem important.
Nothing in this apartment seemed important enough to examine closely.
I consider not going.
In that version, I keep my job. I keep my marriage — whatever this version of it is. I keep Damon at the desk down the hall and Sandra McKenna's nod of approval and the life-sized fiction that everything balances.
Forty-five seconds. Then the coffee maker beeps and I pour a cup and the moment passes.
Because I know what happens in that version too.
In that version I sit at my desk at McKenna for another five years and every case I work — every time I tell a client "you should have looked sooner" — I'm the hypocrite who didn't look.
Who saw the anomaly and chose comfort over clarity.
I can't be that woman. I'm not built for willful blindness. My brain won't let me leave a number unreconciled.
So today happens.
* * *
At 6 AM I do something ugly. I go through Marin's Instagram one more time — not for evidence. I have enough evidence. I go through it to make myself angry. To find the specific photos that turn hesitation into certainty.
March 15: Marin at a spa in Connecticut. Facial, massage, the works. "$400 self-care day because I DESERVE IT." Posted three days after the Q1 invoice payment cleared.
April 22: Marin at a boutique trying on coats. "Found the one!! ??" A Max Mara. I know what Max Mara costs because my mother window-shops there the way other people watch television.
May 30: Marin and me. At my apartment. Saturday night. Wine. Her arm around my shoulder. Caption: "15 years of this one. My person. ??"
I stare at that one. May 30th. She'd received $94,400 in stolen money by then. She was sleeping with my husband every Tuesday. She was running a second shell company under a dead woman's identity. And she took a photo of us and called me her person.
Good. I'm angry now.
* * *
Nate surfaces at 7:15. Coffee. Butter knife. The sequence.
"Morning." He looks at me in my blazer — the charcoal one, the court one. "You look serious."
"Presentation today."
"Oh yeah? Which case?"
I pour his coffee. Set it on the counter in front of him. Watch his fingers wrap around the mug — familiar, automatic. The same hand that signs invoices for a company that doesn't exist.
"New one," I say. "Investor fraud. Shell company funneling money through a vendor that never provided services."
He nods. Drinks. "Sounds like your bread and butter."
"It is."
He tells me about his afternoon — the investor meeting at Shen Capital. "Quarterly update. Marin's presenting the marketing strategy. She's been working really hard on the competitive positioning stuff." He says this with genuine pride. The pride of a CEO whose consultant is delivering.
She's delivering nothing. She's never delivered anything. She shows up, she sits in the office, she produces documents copied from Google searches, and she cashes checks for $47,200.
"That's great," I say.
He kisses me. Mouth slightly open — more intimate than the usual cheek press. Like he's making an effort. Like some part of him is trying to reconnect with the woman he lives with because the woman he's sleeping with on Tuesdays told him she "doesn't notice him anymore" and he believed it.
"Love you," he says. Against my lips.
"I know." Not "love you too." Just — "I know."
He doesn't catch the difference. He's already moving toward the bedroom, coffee in hand, butter knife abandoned on the counter where it will sit until I put it in the dishwasher because that's what I've always done.
I don't put it in the dishwasher. I leave it there. Let the coffee stain the counter. Let something in this apartment be out of order for once.
My bag is packed. The USB drive — thirty-two slides, encrypted, everything — is in the inside pocket. I zip it closed. Check twice.
At 1:30 PM I'll take the 1 train to Cortlandt. Walk to 140 Broadway. Ride the elevator to the fortieth floor. Plug this drive into a projector in a room where my husband and my best friend are sitting side by side, expecting a routine quarterly update.
And then I'll show them what $178,400 looks like when a forensic accountant finds it.
* * *
The morning is slow and purposeless. I don't go to McKenna — I email my assistant at 8: Working remotely today. Then I go to a coffee shop in the West Village where no one knows me and I open the presentation one final time.
Thirty-two slides. I don't change anything.
I just read them. Slowly. The way I'd read a case file before testifying — making sure every number lives in my body, not just on the screen.
If the projector dies, if the file corrupts, if something fails — I can recite every figure from memory. Every date. Every routing number.
At noon I eat half a sandwich. Turkey on rye, mustard, the same thing I always get. I taste nothing. My stomach is a closed account — nothing accepted, nothing disbursed.
At 1:15 I pay. Walk to the subway. The platform is crowded — lunchtime traffic, tourists with too many bags, a man playing saxophone badly enough that people move to the other end of the platform.
The train arrives. I get on. Hold the pole because there are no seats.
140 Broadway. Forty-six floors of glass and steel. I ride the elevator alone — forty floors of brushed metal and my own reflection staring back. Charcoal blazer. Gold studs. Hair pulled back. A woman going to work.
The fortieth floor opens into flowers and money. A receptionist with perfect nails leads me down a hallway of meaningless art to the Meridian Room.
Glass walls. Long table. Projector ready.
Victor Shen at the head. Six other investors settling in. Legal pads. Water glasses.
And at the far end — side by side, laptops open, Marin's slides already queued on her screen:
Nate and Marin.
He sees me. "Blair?" Confusion. Then something warmer — pleasure. Like I'm a surprise he didn't expect. "What are you doing here?"
Marin looks up. Smiles. The full thing — the one that crinkles her eyes, the one I've seen ten thousand times across fifteen years.
"Hey, babe! I didn't know you were coming!"
I walk to the front of the room. Plug in the USB drive.
"I invited Ms. Gallagher," Victor says. Standing. "She's a forensic accountant. She has findings relevant to our investment."
The smile stays on Marin's face. But her hands — under the table where she thinks no one can see — flatten against her thighs.
I click to slide one.
Gallagher Builds — Forensic Audit of Consulting Vendor Payments
Prepared by: Blair Gallagher, CPA, CFE
Confidential — For Investor Review Only
"Let's start," I say, "with a company called Marin Voss Associates. And what happens when you search for it."