They’d bled me slowly, and now they were going for the kill, and they’d sent me to Paris so I wouldn’t be there to see the knife.
I stayed on that floor and recorded every word. The forged signature. The “security freeze” lie. The plan to tell a court I was the thief. The $480,000. The names, the amounts, the timeline. Eric’s family, toasting champagne over the theft of my grandmother’s house, documented themselves completely, because they were so certain the audit-brained wife was on her way to Charles de Gaulle.
When they finally left, I did not confront anyone. I did not burst out of the bathroom.
I walked out the mudroom door, went to Evelyn’s house across the street, and sat at her kitchen table, and the two of us — the risk auditor and the retired estate-law paralegal — began to build the most thorough case either of us had ever assembled.
