10. Russ
RUSS
Ihad a clear view of the cheaters finding out they were on their own, and I am not going to pretend I didn’t enjoy it.
They ended up cornered by the coat closet, the two of them, the crowd peeling away in a widening ring the way people stand back from something spilled. I drifted close enough to hear it, and I wanted to watch.
“You put your name on the deed,” Genevieve said, low and furious. “Your name. I told you to use the LLC. I told you.”
“You said it was clean,” Todd said. “You said she never checks the line items. You promised me.”
“She checked everything, you idiot, she’s an accountant.”
“She’s a project manager,” he said, uselessly.
Genevieve’s voice cracked up into something shrill. “My firm is in that room. My clients are in that room.”
“Your firm,” Todd said. “You dragged me into your firm’s problem.”
“I dragged you? I dragged you? Whose condo, Todd? Whose name on whose deed?”
They were doing my work for me, the way I’d told Dana they would.
Todd looked around for an ally and found a room of his coworkers studying their shoes. Genevieve looked for her clients and found their backs.
“Do you understand what you’ve done to me?”
“You swore she never looked at anything but the numbers,” he shot back.
“Don’t.” She put a hand up between them like a woman closing a drawer. “We’re done. Lose my number.”
He looked like a man who had just understood that the woman he’d burned his marriage down for had been running the same cold math on him that his wife ran on a budget and had reached the same conclusion: that he did not pencil out.
I didn’t say anything to either of them.
I’d already said the only thing I needed to say to Genevieve, on a single page, by the door.
Dana’s plan ended at the walk-through; the walk was theater, the public part, the part the room got to watch.
The page was mine, and the room never saw it.
That morning, before any of this, I’d couriered the forensic file to the state licensing board and the firm’s bonding insurer, filed the complaint, and cut Genevieve’s access to the firm accounts.
The page I held up by the coats was a printout of the filing receipts, nothing else, with the time stamp circled.
None of it was the reckoning. Dana’s walk-through was the reckoning, and it was hers, in front of the people whose good opinion Genevieve had spent a year buying.
What I’d done at noon was quieter and smaller.
I’d made sure that whatever she tried to say tomorrow, the record was already filed and out of her hands.
Dana executed her in the room. I locked the doors behind it so she couldn’t slip out the back, and I let her find out about the doors last, and I’m not proud of how good that felt.
I went to find Dana in the kitchen. She handed me a glass of wine without being asked, because she’d poured two.