I walked into the bank planning to surprise my husband with twenty-eight million dollars, and walked out wondering whether the man sleeping beside me had secretly erased our marriage eight months earlier.
Chapter 2
I drove home at eight-thirty and found Jason on the couch watching college basketball with a bowl of pretzels balanced on his stomach. He glanced at me as casually as a man with nothing to hide.
“Long day?”
“Very.”
He smiled. “Come sit down.”
“I need a shower.”
In the bathroom, I turned on the water so he wouldn’t hear me and called an old graduate-school friend named Rob Pettis. Rob had left architecture after discovering that he cared less about buildings than about finding things people had buried. He now operated a small investigative firm in Raleigh.
“I need a financial trace on Jason,” I said. “And on an employee named Lacey Pruitt.”
“How deep?”
“Until there’s nowhere left to look.”
The next morning, I arrived at the office before seven. I told Mona, our longtime bookkeeper, that I needed vendor reports for a bonding audit. Mona had been with me since the firm consisted of six people, two printers, and one coffee machine that leaked onto the floor. She knew better than to chatter when my voice sounded like that.
Within forty minutes, we found a company called Pruitt Property Services.
Over twenty-eight months, Dunmore Design Group had paid it $418,000 for maintenance, equipment rentals, supplies, and consulting. The invoices looked legitimate at first glance, but the descriptions were vague and the amounts irregular enough to escape easy comparison.
“Who owns it?” I asked.
Mona searched the state business registry. Her face went pale.
“Darlene Pruitt.”
Lacey’s mother.
Mona removed her glasses. “Rachel.”
“Copy everything onto an encrypted drive. Nothing through the company network.”
She nodded once. “Tell me where you want it delivered.”
Three days later, Rob called.
“Lacey’s got a second phone,” he said. “And she’s been receiving money that doesn’t fit her salary.”
I closed my office door.
“How much?”
“Sixty-two thousand over fourteen months, routed through a Delaware entity. There’s more. She has regular communications tied to Meridian Group.”
Meridian was our largest regional competitor. They had beaten us on two contracts during the previous eighteen months, both times by margins so narrow that my project managers had joked they must have been reading our minds.
They hadn’t been reading our minds.
They’d been reading our bids.
Rob’s investigation indicated that confidential pricing documents, client information, and schedules had been passed outside our company. The betrayal suddenly became larger than my marriage. Jason and Lacey hadn’t merely deceived me. They had put forty-two livelihoods and everything I had built at risk.
I thought of the day Lacey completed her drafting certification. She had sat across from me crying because no employer had ever given her that kind of chance.
“You didn’t have to help me,” she’d said.
“Don’t owe me,” I told her. “Just do the work well. And when you’re able, open a door for somebody else.”
“I swear I will.”
Maybe she meant it then. That was the hardest part to accept. Betrayal doesn’t always begin with a villain deciding to become one. Sometimes it begins with envy, convenience, one secret, one excuse, and then another.
Jason, meanwhile, behaved as if nothing had changed. He ate dinner with me. He asked about project meetings. One evening he rubbed my shoulder while I stood at the kitchen counter and told me I was working too hard.
“You should take a weekend off after the courthouse groundbreaking,” he said.
I turned toward him.
For a second I wondered how a face I’d known for nine years could suddenly look like a disguise.
“You’re right,” I said. “Maybe I should.”
The most dangerous piece of the puzzle was our surety bond. Our largest current project was a fourteen-million-dollar courthouse expansion, and Jason had managed the relationship with our bonding agent for six years. Without that bond, we could lose the project, damage our reputation, and perhaps lose the company.
Twice recently, Jason had made a curious remark.
“My guy at the bonding company won’t deal well with sudden management changes.”
At the time, I’d heard business advice.
Now I heard a threat.
Elaine referred me to Carlton Webb, a Charlotte construction attorney whose reputation made developers straighten their paperwork before he entered a room. Carlton was sixty, reserved, and not easily surprised. Yet when I mentioned Uncle Curtis, he stopped writing.
“Your uncle helped me go to law school,” he said.
I stared at him.
“My father painted houses. I had the grades but not the money, and no bank wanted the risk. Curtis co-signed the loan.” Carlton leaned back. “He wrote me every Christmas for twenty years. Never asked for repayment beyond what the bank required. Never asked for a favor. He only said he hoped I was doing honest work.”
I had known Curtis my entire life and had never heard the story.
Carlton closed the file in front of him.
“Tell me everything.”
Over the next week, he and Elaine built a wall around my company one brick at a time. Carlton arranged for a stronger-rated bonding carrier to take over the courthouse project. Evidence of vendor fraud was preserved and referred to the proper authorities. Elaine began challenging the divorce judgment and the documents signed while I was hospitalized.
Mona’s records went into Carlton’s safe.
Jason knew none of it.
At least that was what I believed until the morning of the groundbreaking, when I stepped to the podium, looked out at sixty county officials, contractors, employees, and reporters—and saw my husband standing ten feet away with a folder in his hand.
He smiled at me.
Then he stepped forward and interrupted my speech.
