"What did she say to you?" she asked.

"Exactly."

Her sister's voice was tight.

"She said they had documentation showing the property purchase was funded by a transfer from your joint marital account.

She said they weren't pursuing me personally — those were her exact words, not pursuing me personally — but that they needed a signed statement confirming the arrangement by Friday or the matter would be referred to a different department."

"A different department meaning what?"

"She didn't say.

She didn't have to."

She pressed her hand flat against the steering wheel.

"Don't sign anything.

Don't call her back.

Call me before you do anything."

"I already called you.

That's what I'm doing right now." A pause.

"What did you get us into?"

"I handled it."

"You handled it," her sister repeated, and the way she said it made something tighten in her chest.

"They called my home number.

My home number.

My husband answered."

She closed her eyes.

"Does he know?" she asked.

"He does now."

She didn't respond to that.

"I want to be clear with you," her sister said.

"I helped you because you told me it was clean.

You told me it was just a precaution.

You told me nothing would ever come of it."

"I believed that."

"Did you?"

The question sat between them.

"I need you to hold on until tomorrow," she said.

"I'm meeting Patrick in the morning.

I'll know more after that.

Don't make any decisions tonight."

"My husband wants to call his own lawyer."

"Tell him to wait until tomorrow."

"I can't tell him what to do.

He's furious."

"Then let him be furious.

Just don't let him call anyone tonight.

One night.

That's all I'm asking."

Her sister was quiet for a moment.

When she spoke again, her voice had changed.

The tightness was still there but something else had come into it.

Something older.

"Do you remember when we were young," she said, "and Mum used to say that the problem with you was that you always thought you were the smartest person in the room?"

She didn't answer.

"She wasn't wrong," her sister said.

"She just didn't know it would turn into this."

The call ended.

She sat in the car until the street lights came on.

Then she drove home — to the apartment she had rented six weeks ago in preparation, the one her husband had not known about, the one she had paid for in cash drawn from the investment account.

The apartment that was now, she understood, also part of the documentation.

She unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The rooms were clean and impersonal.

She had not bothered to make them feel like anything.

She had not expected to be here long.

She set the leather folder on the kitchen counter and stood looking at it.

Then she opened it again and went through every page.

Slowly this time.

Not looking for what they had.

Looking for what they didn't have.

She was halfway through when she found it.

A gap.

A three-week window in the transfer records where the documentation jumped from one date to another with nothing in between.

She found a pen.

She circled the dates.

Then she picked up her phone and called Patrick again.

It was nearly ten o'clock.

He answered on the second ring.

"I found something," she said.

"I told you to wait until morning."

"There's a gap in their records.

Three weeks in the second year.

If those transfers aren't documented—"

"It doesn't matter," Patrick said.

"What do you mean it doesn't matter?"

A pause.

When he spoke again, his voice was careful in a way she had not heard from him before.

"I received a call this evening," he said.

"From Diane Marsh."

She went very still.

"She wasn't calling to negotiate," he said.

"She was calling to inform me that they've already filed.

Not civil recovery.

Something else."

"What does that mean, something else?"

"It means this is no longer a divorce case," Patrick said.

"It means you need to come in tonight."