Chapter 4 - The Paper Trail of Greed
By 3:00 AM, the observation wing was quiet save for the rhythmic hiss of my IV pump and the distant squeak of the night nurses' rubber clogs on linoleum.
I woke from a shallow, morphine-tinted sleep to the blue light of Leo’s laptop reflecting off the lenses of his reading glasses. He was surrounded by paper. He had called his personal assistant, who had driven twenty miles through the rain to deliver three leather-bound tax folios from his home study safe, along with five reams of printed banking statements pulled from his private corporate portal.
"Leo?" I whispered, my mouth parched.
He immediately reached for the plastic pitcher on the nightstand, pouring water into a styrofoam cup and holding the bendy straw to my lips with steady fingers. He waited until I took three small sips before setting it down.
"What is all that?" I asked, nodding toward the drifts of white paper covering the foot of the bed.
"The price of my blindness," Leo said quietly. He adjusted his glasses, his face illuminated by a spreadsheet with hundreds of rows highlighted in neon red. "Do you remember the five-thousand-dollar transfer we made every month to the 'Estate Renovation Account'?"
"Of course," I said, wincing as I shifted my hips. "Agnes said the west wing roof had a subterranean leak that the insurance wouldn't cover, and that the foundation needed underpinning."
"There is no subterranean leak," Leo said. He held up a crisp, color-printed bank statement from an account registered under *The Agnes Carter Living Trust*. "My mother had the banking notifications sent to a post office box in town. Every single month for twenty-four months, that five thousand dollars was routed directly into a private brokerage account under her maiden name."
My breath hitched. "That’s... that’s over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars."
"One hundred and forty-two thousand, to be exact," Leo said, tapping a pen against the paper with a dry, rhythmic *click*. "And that’s just the cash skim. Chloe’s 'emergency household expenses' card?"
He pulled up another document, his thumb scrolling through endless pages of line items.
"Three thousand dollars at a medical spa in Scottsdale last month when she told me she was visiting a sick college friend. Eighteen hundred dollars at Nordstrom for 'entertaining supplies' that never entered our pantry. And two weeks ago, on the exact morning I boarded the flight to Tokyo, Chloe charged four thousand six hundred dollars to a boutique travel agency in Manhattan."
"A travel agency?" I asked, my brow furrowing through the dull ache of the painkillers. "For what?"
"A non-refundable Mediterranean cruise for two," Leo said, looking directly at me through his glasses. "Departing next month from Barcelona. Balcony suite on the upper deck. Agnes and Chloe."
The sheer, breathtaking audacity of it settled into the room like a cold stone.
While I had been clipping coupons to keep the grocery bill under budget because Agnes insisted Leo’s tax bracket was "strained"—while I had been scrubbing lime deposits off the master shower tiles on my hands and knees while my husband worked eighty-hour weeks in foreign time zones—his mother and sister were calculating their luxury European vacation on his dime.
"They never intended for you to stay in that house, Em," Leo whispered, his voice cracking slightly. "I just found an email draft on the shared family tablet my mother forgot to log out of. She was writing to her sister, Beatrice."
He slid the tablet across the white blanket toward my hands.
The email was dated three weeks ago:
> *'Dear Bea,*
> *Leo's new bonus structure clears in November. Once the funds land, I am going to insist that he buy out the adjacent parcel for the garden. The Carter name finally carries weight again after the disgrace Arthur left us in. The only remaining blemish is that little mouse he married. She has no family, no pedigree, and no stamina. She’s already whining about dizzy spells and nausea. If we push her hard enough, she’ll either pack her bags or Leo will finally see she isn't equipped to be the wife of an executive. Chloe and I are taking him to Spain in the fall to introduce him to Ambassador Vance’s youngest daughter. A real woman for a real man.'*
I stared at the screen until the letters blurred into dark, jagged smudges.
"Dizzy spells and nausea," I whispered. "I was carrying his child."
Leo’s head snapped up. The pen in his fingers snapped clean in half, the black ink pooling out across his palm, soaking into the cuff of his white shirt like a fresh, dark wound.
"What did you say?" he asked, his voice barely audible.
"I didn't know," I said, a single tear cutting a hot track down my cheek. "Until the tube burst, Leo. The surgeon said... he said I was seven weeks along. The egg implanted in the cornual segment. It was growing... and then it tore through the wall."
Leo stood up. He didn't say a word. He walked into the tiny, adjoining bathroom of the hospital room, shut the door, and for the next ten minutes, the only sound in the sterile suite was the muffled, agonizing sound of a grown man weeping until he ran out of air.
When he finally emerged, he had washed his face with cold water. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin pale, but the indecision that had plagued him for six years was entirely, irrevocably gone.
"Get some rest, Emily," he said, pulling the blanket gently up to my collarbones and tucking the corners around my shoulders with tender precision.
"Leo... what are you going to do?"
May you like
"I’m going to do what I should have done the day my father died," he said, closing the laptop with a definitive snap. "I'm going to take out the trash."
---
