Chapter 7 - The Paper Trail
By Wednesday, the lawyers were involved, though neither of ours had spoken to the other yet. Mine was a woman named Eleanor Vance—no relation to Marcus, thank God—whose office smelled of old parchment and peppermint tea, and whose desk was piled so high with manila folders that she looked like she was operating a lighthouse behind a reef of paperwork.
“An eight-month clandestine relationship involving corporate travel expenses and shared lodging during business-designated trips,” Eleanor said, adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses as she read over the list of credit card statements I had downloaded from our joint account on Tuesday night. “Simone, do you realize what this means for the division of assets?”
“I don’t care about the division,” I said, looking out her second-story window at the brick courtyard below where a pigeon was hopping back and forth across a puddle. “I want the house signed over to me by Friday, or I want it on the market by Monday. And I want his name off the graphic design retainer accounts immediately.”
Eleanor lowered her pen and looked at me over the rims of her glasses. Her eyes were small, sharp, and entirely devoid of pity—which was exactly why I had hired her.
“He’s going to contest the speed of the separation,” she said quietly. “Men like Marcus—men who have built their entire identity on being the reasonable, steady provider—hate nothing more than a quiet, definitive exit. They prefer a fight because a fight lets them pretend they were driven to it.”
“Let him fight the drywall,” I said. “I’m not staying in that house another week with his golf shoes in the mudroom and his gray socks in the hamper.”
That afternoon, I drove back to Elm Street with three large brown cardboard boxes from the liquor store down the street.
The house was empty. Marcus hadn't been back since Sunday; according to his assistant at the firm, whom I called from the car using a burner number just to be sure, he had checked into an extended-stay suite in Annapolis near the yacht basin and hadn't been seen in the Rockville office since Tuesday morning.
I started with his side of the closet.
It didn't take long. Marcus was a neat man—a man who folded his socks into tight little squares and kept his silk ties hung by color from dark cedar racks. I pulled them down one by one, letting the navy, the burgundy, and the silver silks slide off their brass hooks and tumble into the open mouth of the cardboard box like dead snakes.
When I reached the back corner, behind an old winter ski jacket he hadn't worn since we went to Vermont in 2022, my hand brushed against something hard and rectangular tucked between the wall and the cedar paneling.
I pulled it out. It was a shoebox—an old Nike box with the lid taped shut with yellowed masking tape.
I sat down on the edge of our king-sized bed—the bed with the linen sheets that still smelled faintly of his sandalwood soap—and used the key from my key-chain to slit the tape.
Inside wasn’t money or old love letters. It was a stack of small, square thermal receipts from restaurants in Annapolis, Rockville, and Washington, stretching back eighteen months—ten months further than Brielle had admitted to in the hotel suite.
May you like
There were dinners for two at the Iron Gate in Dupont Circle. Lunches at the Boatyard Bar & Grill in Eastport. Hotel charges from the Loews Annapolis Hotel dating back to the winter before our anniversary last year—the weekend he told me he had gone to Philadelphia for a regional energy symposium.
I didn't cry. I didn't even feel the cold drop in my stomach this time. I simply picked up my phone, took three clear, well-lit photographs of the receipt stack with the date visible in the corner of the frame, and texted them to Eleanor with a single line of text: Found the prologue.
