Chapter 2
SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS
Drew’s breathing goes heavy and slow. That wet half-snore kicks in—the one where his jaw drops open and he’s gone, fully gone, dead to the world. I’ve been lying here rigid, staring at the ceiling, waiting for this exact sound.
I slide out of bed one inch at a time. The bed frame creaks and I freeze. He doesn’t move.
Kellee is on the living room couch under the throw blanket, still dressed, still awake.
We told Drew a pipe burst in her apartment and the building shut off water to her whole floor overnight.
He’d said oh no, of course she can stay, you guys can have a girls’ night—like he was doing us both a favor.
Like Kellee being here was his generosity and not the only reason I haven’t come apart at the seams.
“He’s out,” I whisper.
She’s already on her feet. “Where’s the laptop?”
“Office. Desk drawer.”
We don’t turn on the hall light. The office is the spare bedroom with an IKEA desk and a filing cabinet Drew keeps locked. His laptop sits in the top drawer.
I open it. My fingers find the keys in the dark before Kellee reaches past me and clicks on the desk lamp.
“Password?” she asks.
“AudreyBug0503. Her name and birthday.”
“Of course it is.”
The desktop loads. I reach for the browser and Kellee catches my wrist.
“Start with his bookmarks. People save what matters.”
She’s right. I open Chrome and click the bookmarks bar. ESPN. His company portal. A Reddit thread about a home theater he’ll never build. Then a folder labeled Finances with two links inside. The first is Chase—our joint account. The second is Pacific Coast Credit Union.
“What the hell is Pacific Coast Credit Union?” Kellee says.
“I have no idea. We bank at Chase. We’ve always banked at Chase.”
I click the link. A login page loads—green and white, member portal. Username and password fields sitting there blank.
I type AudreyBug0503. Invalid credentials.
Larson88—his old password for everything. Invalid credentials.
Our anniversary. His birthday. His mother’s maiden name with numbers after it.
Invalid. Invalid. Invalid.
“He picked a password I wouldn’t guess.” My voice cracks on the last word. “He did that on purpose.”
Kellee pulls my hand off the trackpad. “Stop. You’re not getting in this way. Let’s look at what we can actually see.”
“What if there’s—”
“Sloane. Stop. Back up. What else does he use on this computer?”
I close the bank tab. My hands are shaking and my jaw aches from clenching. “Let’s check his credit card. He never logs out of anything.”
“Pull it up.”
His credit card statement loads—still logged in, because why would he secure it? He never expected me to look. His transaction history fills the screen and Kellee leans forward, her shoulder pressed against mine.
Restaurant after restaurant. Osteria Luce. The Palisade. Kūra Sushi. A place called Nightbird I’ve never heard of. Every charge tagged to the same name.
Patty Yates.
“Who is that?” My mouth is dry.
“How far back does it go?”
I scroll. Five months of dinners. Five months. Before Audrey could roll over. Before she could sit up. While I was home with cracked nipples and a baby who wouldn’t latch and formula crusted into every shirt I owned, Drew was having omakase with a woman named Patty.
“Kellee, who is she?”
“Let’s find out.” Kellee reaches across me for the trackpad, opens a new tab, and pulls up Facebook. She types Patty Yates into the search bar. Two results. The first has a profile picture—dark hair, warm smile, late twenties. Pretty.
That shouldn’t matter. My stomach drops anyway.
“Her profile’s mostly locked,” Kellee says. “But the cover photo’s public. Click it.”
I click.
Golden hour. Soft focus. A woman’s left hand pressed flat against a man’s chest. His face is cropped at the chin. And on her ring finger, catching the light—
My lungs stop working.
I know that ring. I know the center stone—the old European cut with the feather inclusion that made it imperfect, the one my grandmother wore for forty-one years.
I know the Ceylon blue sapphire flanking it on the left side of the band.
I know the toi et moi setting that Francis’s father redesigned three times because the stones kept overpowering each other.
I know the slight asymmetry where the prongs accommodate the sapphire’s cushion cut against the diamond’s round.
I used to trace the channel detail along the band with my thumbnail during long meetings when I was bored.
Ten thousand times I looked at that ring on my own hand. It’s on Patty Yates’s hand now. On her left ring finger. In an engagement photo.
“That’s your ring,” Kellee says.
“I know.”
Neither of us moves. The white noise machine hisses through the baby monitor on the coffee table. Upstairs, Drew half-snores in our bed—the man who took my dead grandmother’s diamond out of our bedroom and put it on another woman’s finger and came home and watched me cry about losing it.
“Sloane.”
I can’t answer. My chest is being crushed. Something is sitting on my ribs and pressing down and I can’t get a full breath. The screen blurs. I blink and my lashes are wet and I’m gripping the edge of the desk so hard the laminate digs into my palms.
“He proposed to her.” My voice comes out strangled. “He took my grandmother’s ring and he proposed to somebody else.”
“I know.”
“He watched me cry about it. He said we’ll find it, babe. He suggested I see a therapist because I was too upset about a ring he already gave away.”
“I know.” Kellee’s hand closes over mine on the desk. Her grip is hard. “Listen to me. The bank account, this woman, the ring—you can’t get to any of it from this laptop. You need someone who can actually find what he’s hiding. Someone who does this for a living.”
“Like a PI?”
“Exactly like a PI. My coworker’s sister used one in her divorce. I’ll get the name tomorrow.” She squeezes tighter. “But right now, close the laptop. Put it back exactly where it was. He can’t know you looked.”
I close the laptop. I slide it into the desk drawer. I turn off the lamp and we sit there in the dark and I press my thumb into the groove on my ring finger where the band used to sit. The indent is almost gone. Like my hand is forgetting it was ever there.
I don’t sleep. I lie next to Drew and listen to him breathe and feel something building behind my sternum that isn’t grief. Grief is soft. This has teeth.
The bell above the door jangles when I walk into Carlson & Son. The smell hits me—metal polish, old wood, warm dust baking in the light through the front window.
Francis Carlson looks up from behind the counter and his face shifts. He was expecting me.
“Mrs. Larson.”
“Sloane.”
“Sloane.” He doesn’t try to shake my hand. “I pulled everything after we spoke. Sit, please—or don’t. Whatever you need.”
There’s a stool on my side of the counter but I don’t sit. My legs are the only thing keeping me upright and if I stop moving I might not start again.
The counter in front of him is cleared except for a manila folder and a flat wooden box. No display pieces, no customer trays. He set this up for me.
He opens the folder. On top is a sketch on heavy drafting paper, slightly yellowed at the edges—pencil cross-hatching, precise lines, notation marks I can’t read. The ring, rendered in his father’s hand. I’d recognize the setting anywhere.
“My dad drew this,” Francis says. “It was one of his last custom pieces before he got sick. He used to talk about it—the two family stones that didn’t want to cooperate. He reworked the geometry three times.”
“I remember. He called me twice about the sapphire.”
“That sounds like him.” A ghost of a smile, gone fast. “He refused to force anything. Said if the stones didn’t agree, the setting had to negotiate.” He slides a second page across the counter. “This is the provenance sheet. Both stones documented on our letterhead.”
I read the first entry and my throat tightens.
My grandmother’s diamond, reduced to a typed line: 1.
2-carat old European cut, VS1 clarity, feather inclusion at 4 o’clock.
She wore the original ring for forty-one years.
It was on her hand when she rolled pie crust, when she braided my hair, when she held me at my mother’s funeral and didn’t say a word because there was nothing to say.
“And the sapphire,” Francis says, pointing to the second entry. “Drew’s grandmother’s. Point-eight-carat Ceylon blue, cushion cut. Natural silk inclusions.”
“What about the resizing?”
He pulls the last document from the folder.
A work order form, handwritten, Carlson & Son letterhead at the top.
Drew’s name. Last four digits of his credit card.
The date—March 14th. And in Francis’s handwriting at the bottom: Resize from 7 to 5.
5. Client states wife has lost weight postpartum. Rush turnaround requested.
I read it twice. Client states wife has lost weight postpartum.
“He said that to you. Those words.”
“He did.” Francis’s jaw flexes. “He stood right where you’re standing. Said the ring was sliding off your finger and he wanted to surprise you for your anniversary.”
“Our anniversary is in October.”
Francis’s hands go flat on the counter. “He didn’t mention that.”
“No. He wouldn’t.”
“He told me—” Francis stops. Starts again.
“He looked me right in the eye. This calm, reasonable expression, like he was doing something thoughtful. And I bought it. Didn’t even hesitate.
I pulled the prongs on my father’s last commission, resized the band, reset everything, and handed it back to him in a gift box. ”
“A gift box.”
“With a ribbon. He asked for one.”
The concrete-setting feeling is back—that cold heaviness behind my sternum, hardening, locking into place. He gift-wrapped my grandmother’s stolen diamond. He asked for a ribbon.
“That’s on me,” Francis says. His voice has gone rough.
“I should have called you before I touched the piece. You were the co-client on the original commission—your name is right there on the intake form. But he was standing in front of me with a credit card and a story and I just—I didn’t question it. ”
“Nobody questions Drew.” The words taste bitter. “He’s built for that. He’s built to be believed.”
Francis holds my gaze for a second. Then he slides the entire folder across the counter toward me.
“One more thing.” He opens the wooden box and pulls out a jeweler’s loupe.
“The feather inclusion at four o’clock in your grandmother’s diamond—it’s like a fingerprint.
Unique to that stone. If you ever need me to confirm that a ring in a photograph is the same piece my father built, I can do that. I will do that.”
“You’d testify?”
“In a heartbeat.”
I pick up the folder. My hands aren’t shaking anymore. That’s new. Something has shifted in my body—the trembling has been replaced by a stillness that feels deliberate, like every muscle has decided to hold steady.
“Thank you, Francis.”
“Don’t thank me. My hands did this. I didn’t know, but I did the work.”
The bell jangles behind me on the way out. The parking lot is bright and ordinary—someone loading dry cleaning into a trunk, a kid kicking his legs in a minivan, heat shimmering off the asphalt.
I sit in my car with the folder on the passenger seat. Drew’s name in black ink on the work order. Client states wife has lost weight postpartum.
I pick up my phone.
Kellee answers on the first ring. “How’d it go?”
“I have everything. Design sketch, stone provenance, the resizing order with his name on it. All documented.”
“Good. That’s good. Now what?”
“The bank account. The money. I can see the edges of what he’s doing, but I can’t reach any of it from the outside.”
“I got the name, by the way. My coworker’s sister—she said he was thorough. Really thorough.”
“Good. Set it up.”
“Are you okay?”
I look at the folder on the passenger seat. I look at my bare left hand on the steering wheel.
“I’m done crying about it, Kellee. I need a professional.”