Chapter 4
THE STAKEOUT
“You shouldn’t ask how we found this,” Jonah says, and he’s holding up a piece of paper with an address written on it in handwriting that isn’t his.
We’re in his hotel room because it has better light, which is what he said when he knocked on my door twenty minutes ago, but really it’s because his room has a desk and mine has a nightstand the size of a dinner plate.
Same hard bed. Same bleach-scented sheets.
Same thin walls. His laptop is open on the desk surrounded by printouts and a coffee cup from the lobby that smells burned in a way that suggests the hotel’s coffee maker is a war crime.
He’s been up for hours — I can tell by the number of tabs open on his screen and the fact that his glasses are slightly crooked, like he’s pushed them up so many times they’ve given up sitting straight.
“But you’re going to tell me anyway,” I say.
“I’m going to tell you there’s a guy I work with.
He specializes in financial forensics — the kind that operates in the spaces between what’s legal and what’s necessary.
He’s very good. He’s also very expensive, but he owes me, so don’t worry about cost.” Jonah sets the paper on the desk between us.
“The bank account — the one at Banco Nacional, the one the manager confirmed was active — it’s linked to a residential address.
A property. My guy pulled it from records that aren’t publicly searchable, using methods I won’t describe, and what he found is a villa in a gated community about forty minutes outside the city.
Ocean-adjacent. The property was purchased eleven months ago through one of the shell entities we’ve been tracking. ”
Eleven months. Drew bought a villa in Costa Rica eleven months ago. While I was repainting the guest bathroom in our house — our mortgaged-twice-without-my-knowledge house — he was buying oceanfront property in Central America through a fake company.
“The purchase price was six hundred and eighty thousand US dollars,” Jonah continues. “Paid in full. No mortgage. The funds originated from the same offshore account that received the transfers from your joint assets.”
I hear him. I hear every word. But something is happening underneath the facts, something I wasn’t prepared for, and it’s this: a tiny, treacherous flare of hope.
Because if Drew is alive —
No. Stop.
But my brain won’t stop. If Drew is alive, then I didn’t lose him.
If Drew is alive, then the man who rubbed my feet on Sundays and remembered how I take my coffee and slow-danced with me in the kitchen to no music — that man still exists.
Somewhere in this country, breathing the same humid air I’m breathing, his heart is beating.
The heart I listened to on a thousand Sunday mornings with my ear pressed to his chest. He’s alive.
And he left me on purpose.
The two truths crash into each other so hard I have to grip the edge of the desk.
Because I can’t want him back and want him destroyed at the same time, except I do — I do, and it’s making me sick, this whiplash between relief and rage, between the muscle memory of loving someone for twelve years and the reality of what that someone did.
My body hasn’t caught up. My body still remembers his hands and his laugh and the specific way he’d say my name first thing in the morning, sleepy and warm, like I was the best thing he was waking up to. My body is an idiot.
“Sophie.”
I look up. Jonah is watching me with that precise, scanning expression — not pity, not concern, just reading.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re white-knuckling the desk.”
I let go. My fingers ache from the grip.
“I’m fine. I just — for a second I — “ I don’t finish the sentence.
I can’t say it out loud: For a second I was glad he’s alive.
It sounds insane. It sounds like weakness.
It sounds like something the old Sophie would feel — the Sophie who believed the quarterly statements and planted a garden for a man who was already gone.
“I’m heading there now.” Jonah folds the paper and puts it in his pocket. “Are you sure you want to come?”
Am I sure? There’s a villa forty minutes from here and my husband might be inside it, alive and tanned and living a life he built with my money, and some pathetic, still-married part of me wants to see his face not to confront him but just to see him, to confirm that he’s real, that the years were real, that I didn’t imagine the whole thing — and that part of me is at war with the part that wants to burn every trace of him out of my life.
“What if it’s not what we think?” I hear myself say, and I hate the words even as they leave my mouth. “What if there’s an explanation?”
Jonah doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t give me the gentle, pitying look. He reaches across the desk and turns his laptop to face me. The spreadsheet — the color-coded one, red and blue and yellow, the wiring diagram of my dismantled marriage.
“Eighteen months of structured transfers through four shell companies,” he says.
“A fabricated death. A fast-tracked death certificate. A life insurance policy with another woman’s name on it.
A property purchased with marital assets in a foreign country.
” His voice is steady and completely without cruelty.
“That’s not a misunderstanding, Sophie. That’s architecture. ”
The hope dies. Not slowly — it snaps, like a bone, clean and sudden and so painful I feel it behind my eyes. Good. I needed it to break. I needed someone to break it for me because I wasn’t going to do it myself, not with twelve years of love still rotting inside me, clouding everything.
“Then let’s go,” I say, and my voice is different now. Harder. The last soft thing just got burned away and what’s left is a woman who is going to drive forty minutes into the hills and look at the house her husband stole from her and document every inch of it.
Jonah picks up the car keys. “Surveillance only. We observe, we document, we leave. No contact today.”
“I know.”
“If he’s there, you’re going to want to talk to him.”
“I won’t.”
“You’re going to want to walk up to that door and ask him every question that’s been eating you alive for the past month.”
“Jonah.” I meet his eyes and hold. “I’ll be fine. Today I build the file.”
Something shifts in his face — a flicker of something that isn’t professional, that has no place in the retainer agreement, that I catch and release like a fish I’m not keeping. Not today.
We walk out into the Costa Rican morning, already too hot, already too bright for what we’re about to do.
The villa is worse than I imagined, and I imagined plenty on the forty-minute drive through green hills that got lusher as we climbed, the air thickening with the smell of something tropical and blooming that I’d find beautiful under any other circumstances.
It’s worse because it’s gorgeous. White stucco walls, terra-cotta roof, bougainvillea spilling over the gate in violent shades of pink and orange.
A driveway visible through iron bars, leading to a front door painted deep blue — the kind of blue someone chose on purpose, with care.
My house has a blue front door. I picked it out. Drew said he loved it.
Jonah parks on a dirt shoulder about two hundred yards down the road, angled so we can see the gate through the windshield. He kills the engine and the car ticks in the heat.
“Now we wait,” he says.
Twenty minutes in, the car is an oven. I crack my window and the air that seeps in is heavy and wet and smells like flowers and dirt, and Jonah cracks his and says, “Tell me if you see anyone on foot. Dog walkers, gardeners, anyone with a routine.”
“You think he has a gardener?”
“Someone’s maintaining that bougainvillea. It didn’t style itself.”
I stare through the windshield at the cascade of pink.
Drew killed every houseplant he ever touched.
I was the one with the green thumb. I was the one on my knees in the dirt at our house, planting hydrangeas, building window boxes, making the place feel alive while he — what? Sat inside and wired money to Panama?
“How long were you in Army intelligence?” I ask, because the silence is starting to fill up with thoughts I don’t want to have.
“Six years. Signals and cyber, which means I spent most of it in rooms that smelled like burned coffee, listening to communications and pretending I understood what I was hearing.”
“Did you?”
“Eventually. The trick is patterns. People think intelligence is about secrets, but it’s really about patience — you sit with incomplete information long enough and the shape starts to emerge. Most of the job is waiting.”
“You keep saying that. Waiting.”
“Because it’s true and nobody believes me. They think investigative work is car chases and wiretaps. It’s sitting in a hot car for six hours and noticing that the mailman comes at two-fifteen.” He adjusts the binoculars. “This stakeout, for instance. Classic trash compactor scenario.”
I look at him. “I’m going to regret asking.”
“Star Wars. The original. Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewie trapped in the Death Star garbage compactor. Walls closing in, they’re standing in trash, something terrible is lurking under the surface, and all they can do is wait and hope someone shuts it down before they get crushed.
” He gestures at the car — the heat, the vinyl seats, the ashtray stink.
“The walls are closing in, we’re sitting in garbage, and we don’t know what’s going to come crawling out. ”
“Are you Han Solo in this scenario?”
“Obviously.”