Chapter 5 #2
I’m crying because I did have something real. It just wasn’t what I thought it was. And I’m crying because he faked his own death rather than ask me for a divorce, because splitting our money was more painful to him than splitting our life. That’s what I was worth. Less than half.
A knock. Two knocks, a pause, one more.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand. It doesn’t help — my eyes are swollen, my nose is running, I look exactly like what I am. I open the door anyway.
Jonah is standing there with his laptop bag. He takes one look at my face and his jaw does something tight.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“I didn’t ask.”
“Good. Come in. We have work to do.”
He sets up at the nightstand — the nightstand the size of a dinner plate — and doesn’t say a word about my face or my voice or the fact that I’m sniffing every four seconds. He opens his laptop, pulls up the evidence folder, and starts working.
I go to the bathroom. I splash water on my face.
I look at myself in the mirror — blotchy, red-eyed, wrecked — and I say, out loud, to nobody: “He was tired.” I almost laugh.
Twelve years. A home. A life. And he was tired.
He was tired of having dinner with me, so he built four shell companies and bought a villa in Costa Rica and faked a maritime accident.
A man who was too lazy to file for divorce but not too lazy to engineer an eighteen-month disappearance.
I dry my face. I go back out.
“Marisol Vega,” Jonah says without looking up. “Confirmed. The name Drew used at the villa matches the insurance beneficiary. I cross-referenced with the bank account records — she’s co-signed on the property.”
“Co-signed.”
“She’s on the deed, Sophie.”
My jaw clenches so hard my teeth ache. “She’s on the deed to a house bought with my money.”
“Marital assets. Yes.” He finally looks up. “That makes recovery easier, actually. Co-mingled marital funds used to purchase jointly held property in a fraud scheme — any asset recovery attorney is going to love this.”
I sit on the bed and pull up the photos on my phone. My hands have stopped shaking. I start transferring them to Jonah’s laptop.
“She thinks he’s divorced,” I say. “That’s what he told her — that we’re divorced.
So she’s living in that villa, sleeping in that bed, calling him love, and she thinks I’m back in the States, moved on, some ex-wife she doesn’t have to think about.
She didn’t know I stood in front of two hundred people and gave a eulogy for the man she’s grilling fish for. ”
Jonah takes the phone. Our hands brush — his warm against my cold — and I feel it move through me, a current that has no business being here right now. I pull back.
“I gave a eulogy,” I say. My voice comes out strange.
“I stood up in front of everyone and talked about what a good man he was. How he coached Little League even though we didn’t have kids.
How he remembered our neighbors’ names.” I look at Jonah.
“And the whole time — the whole time — he was here. With her. In that villa. And she probably cooked him dinner the night I was picking out flowers for his casket.”
Jonah stops typing. He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me, and for once the glasses don’t hide what’s in his eyes.
“I’m going to take everything back,” I say.
“Every dollar. The villa, the accounts, the insurance money — all of it. And when it’s done, when the lawyers and the FBI are finished with him, I want him to know what it feels like to have forty-five thousand dollars and a house he can’t afford and nobody coming to save him. ”
My voice is steady now. My hands are steady. The tears dried up somewhere between the bathroom mirror and this sentence, and what replaced them is cleaner and more useful.
We finish the file. Jonah tilts the laptop toward me to review the final package and our hands end up close on the edge of the screen — his thumb near mine on the metal casing — and for a second neither of us moves.
I take the laptop. He lets go.
“I’ll book flights for tomorrow morning,” he says, standing. His knee clips the nightstand, the coffee cup rattles, and he catches it, and the movement brings him close — close enough that I can smell hotel soap and warm skin — and I look up and he’s looking down and the room is very small.
“Early flight,” I say. “I want to be home by afternoon.”
“I’ll find something.” He picks up his bag. Pauses in the doorway. “Sophie.”
“Yeah.”
“Letting him talk. Letting him spin the whole story and then cutting through it.” He shakes his head. “That was the hardest play. And you made it look easy.”
The door closes behind him. I sit on the bed with the evidence file glowing on the laptop screen and I feel the last of the shaking leave my body. Not because I’m calm — because the shaking served its purpose and now it’s done. So did the crying.
And so did my marriage.
Tomorrow I fly home. Tomorrow I hand this file to an attorney and let the machinery start.
Drew Calloway faked his death because he got bored of being married to me.
I’m going to make sure he pays for that for the rest of his life.