Chapter 6
CELEbrATION
The apartment is small. Nine hundred square feet, second floor, a kitchen with exactly enough counter space for a cutting board and a glass of wine but not both at the same time. The landlord called it “efficient.” I call it mine.
I’ve been here two weeks. The boxes are mostly unpacked — I didn’t have much to unpack, which turns out to be one of the few advantages of having your entire life detonated.
You move fast when everything you own fits in a rental van.
I kept the kitchen stuff and my books. Everything else is in storage or sold or sitting in a house on Wyndham Drive that belongs to a bank now.
I’m making coffee when my phone rings. Linda Chao. I set the mug down.
“Tell me something good, Linda.”
“Drew’s been arrested.” She says it the way she says everything — brisk, precise, the verbal equivalent of a staple gun. “Federal agents picked him up in San José two days ago. Costa Rican authorities cooperated with the extradition request. He’s in custody in Miami as of this morning.”
I lean against the counter. The coffee maker gurgles behind me, finishing its cycle, and the sound is so ordinary, so Tuesday morning, that the contrast almost makes me laugh.
“The charges,” Linda continues, and I can hear paper shuffling — she’s reading from something, probably with that shark smile she gets when a case breaks open.
“Insurance fraud. Wire fraud. Money laundering. The wire fraud alone carries up to twenty years. The FBI has the full financial trail — every shell company, every transfer, every fabricated statement. Your investigator’s documentation was, and I’m quoting the assistant U.S.
attorney here, ‘the most comprehensive private forensic package I’ve seen in fifteen years. ’”
Jonah. I think of him at that standing desk, color-coding a spreadsheet at two in the morning, glasses crooked, building the architecture of Drew’s destruction one transaction at a time.
I’ll tell him later. He’ll pretend it’s not a big deal and push his glasses up and change the subject, and I’ll let him, because I’m learning that the way Jonah receives a compliment is by deflecting it into the nearest available silence.
“What about the money?” I ask.
“The offshore accounts have been frozen. All of them — the ones in Costa Rica and two more we didn’t know about in Panama.
Asset recovery is in motion. The villa is being seized as proceeds of fraud.
” She pauses. Not for effect — Linda doesn’t do effect.
She pauses because the next part matters and she wants me to hear it clean.
“You’re going to get it back, Sophie. Not all of it — legal fees, government claims, it’ll take time and there will be costs.
But the bulk of the marital assets are recoverable. We’re talking millions, not thousands.”
Millions. Not thousands.
Six months ago I was standing in a financial advisor’s office learning that I had forty-five thousand dollars to my name.
I drove home in a Mercedes I couldn’t afford to a house I was about to lose and ate peanut butter with a spoon because groceries felt pointless.
And now I’m standing in a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment that I chose, that I pay for, and a woman on the phone is telling me I’m going to be okay.
“And the insurance policy?” I ask. “The twenty-five million?”
“Void. The insurer canceled the policy the day the fraud charges were filed. Marisol Vega won’t see a cent of it.” Another pause. “There may be separate charges for her, depending on what the investigation turns up about her knowledge of the scheme. But that’s not our problem.”
Not our problem. Drew’s problem. Marisol’s problem. Not mine.
“Sophie,” Linda says, and her voice shifts — still brisk, still Linda, but with something underneath that I’ve only heard once before, when she first looked at the insurance policy and said oh, this is going to be fun.
“You did this. The trip, the evidence, the confrontation — none of this happened without you getting on that plane. I want you to know that.”
I look around the apartment. The small kitchen. The boxes. The coffee maker that cost forty dollars and makes coffee that tastes like forty dollars. The window above the sink that looks out onto a parking lot, which is not a garden, which is not six bedrooms and a wine cellar and a pool.
It’s mine. Every square foot of it. Nobody is hiding anything in the walls.
“Thanks, Linda.”
“I’ll send the formal update this afternoon. Go celebrate. You’ve earned it.”
She hangs up. I pick up my coffee. It’s too hot and I drink it anyway, standing at the counter in my small kitchen in my small apartment, and I feel something I haven’t felt in months.
Not relief — relief is what you feel when something bad almost happens and doesn’t.
This is different. This is the feeling of weight leaving.
The slow, full-body release of a woman who has been clenching every muscle since the day she sat in a parking garage with shaking hands and a dead husband who wasn’t dead.
I set the mug down. I open my phone. I text Jonah.
The FBI called you the best forensic package they’ve seen in fifteen years. Thought you should know.
Three dots. Then:
That’s because I am. — JM
Then, ten seconds later:
Dinner tonight? I’ll bring wine. You cook.
I type back: Deal.
I put the phone down and stand there for a minute.
Just stand there. The coffee maker clicks off.
The parking lot outside is empty and sunlit and completely uninteresting.
The apartment is quiet in the way that only a space with one person in it can be — not lonely, not echoing, just still.
The good kind of still. The kind that means nothing is wrong.
Drew Calloway is in federal custody in Miami. His accounts are frozen. His villa is gone. His insurance policy is void. And his wife — his legal, still-married, not-dead wife — is drinking forty-dollar coffee in a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment and she is fine.
Better than fine.
I finish the coffee. I wash the mug. I put it back in the cabinet, next to the three other mugs I own, and I start thinking about what to make for dinner.
Jonah is eating my pasta like a man who hasn’t had a home-cooked meal in months, which, based on what I’ve seen of his office and his general life-maintenance habits, is probably accurate.
“This is good,” he says, pointing his fork at the bowl. “This is really good.”
“It’s lemon and garlic and butter. A child could make it.”
“A child with your instincts.” He takes another bite. The glasses have fogged slightly from the steam, and he pushes them up with the back of his wrist because his hands are occupied, and the gesture does something to me that I don’t redirect from. Not tonight.
We’re at the kitchen island because I asked him to dinner and he said yes and now he’s here, in my apartment. Just an evening. Just wine. Just the man across from me in a dark shirt I haven’t seen before, eating pasta I made because I wanted to use my hands for something that wasn’t a legal file.
“Tell me something that isn’t about work,” I say.
He looks up. Chews. Thinks. “I built a computer from parts when I was fourteen. Took me three months. My mom thought I was building a bomb.”
“Were you?”
“I was building a machine that could run Civilization III at max settings. Same energy.” He sips his wine. “Your turn.”
“I wanted to be a marine biologist until I was twenty-two. I was going to study whale migration patterns.”
“What happened?”
“I got married. I thought I was being sensible.” The sentence lands and I wait for the familiar clench — the bitterness — and it doesn’t come. It’s just a fact. I take a drink of the wine Jonah brought. “Anyway. Whales.”
“Whales,” he agrees, and his mouth does the thing — the corner twitch, the almost-smile that always decides against it — except tonight it doesn’t decide against it.
Tonight it goes the full distance, and Jonah Mitchell smiles at me across my kitchen island, and my stomach drops like I’ve missed a step on the stairs.
I set my glass down. His eyes track my hand, then come back to my face.
“You’re not my investigator anymore,” I say.
“I haven’t been since you handed the file to your attorney.”
“Good.” I come around the island. His body shifts on the stool — turning toward me, his knee angling out — and I step into the space between his legs and put my hands on his jaw and kiss him.
His stubble scrapes my palms. His mouth is warm and for one second he’s still — just his breath catching — and then his hands close on my hips and pull me in and the kiss stops being polite.
His tongue slides against mine and heat drops through my stomach, pooling low, and I press closer because I haven’t been touched in months and my body is screaming for it — every nerve lit up, skin prickling, a deep ache between my legs that I’ve been ignoring since Costa Rica and am done ignoring.
His hands slide to the small of my back and press me flush against him. I can feel him hard through his jeans, pressed against my stomach, and the want hits me like a fist. I roll my hips against him and he groans into my mouth — a low, rough sound that I feel between my thighs.
“Bedroom,” I say against his mouth.
“Yeah.” His voice is thick.
He stands and I grab his hand and pull him down the hallway.
We don’t make it clean — he presses me against the wall outside the bedroom and kisses my neck, his teeth grazing below my ear, and my hips push forward on instinct, grinding against his thigh.
I’m already wet. I’ve been wet since I kissed him in the kitchen, maybe since he smiled at me across the island, maybe since a hotel room in Costa Rica when our hands touched over a laptop and I pretended I didn’t feel it.