"The day I buried my parents, my husband came home for the first time in eight months—not to comfort me, but to steal the inheritance he thought grief had made too weak to protect."

CHAPTER 4

Jason laughed, but the sound came out thin.

“You people are insane.”

Mr. Thompson removed another folder from his briefcase.

Inside were photographs.

Jason and Megan at a lakeside condo.

Jason signing paperwork under a false business name.

Jason withdrawing money from our joint emergency account while my mother was in the hospital.

Jason selling my grandmother’s jewelry to a pawn shop two towns over.

My stomach turned.

“That jewelry was missing,” I whispered.

Jason looked away.

I remembered tearing through drawers for hours while my mother cried in the kitchen, because the pearl earrings from her wedding day had vanished.

Jason had told me I probably misplaced them.

Mr. Thompson laid one final photo on the table.

It showed Jason outside my parents’ rental duplex, speaking to a man in a work truck.

“The investigator believes Jason was trying to arrange a private sale before probate was complete,” Mr. Thompson said. “The buyer thought Jason already had authority.”

Megan stared at Jason.

“You said this was clean.”

“It was going to be,” Jason snapped.

That was the moment I understood Megan was not only his mistress.

She was his accomplice.

Maybe she had not known everything. Maybe she had told herself I was weak, boring, pathetic, the inconvenient wife standing between her and a better life.

But she had come to my parents’ house on the day of their funeral to help him finish taking what was left of me.

That was enough.

I turned my phone toward Jason.

“Say it again,” I said. “Say nobody will believe me.”

His face twisted.

“You think a video saves you?”

“No,” I said. “The truth does.”

Blue and red lights flashed across the front windows.

Megan gasped.

Jason turned toward the porch.

Mr. Thompson slipped his phone into his pocket.

“I called the sheriff’s office when I heard the first threat,” he said.