Chapter 3: What Comes Through a Closed Door
I pressed one finger to my lips.
Chloe understood immediately.
She stepped back against the bookshelf and did not move.
"Yes," I called out.
"Just finishing some reading."
A pause.
Then the door handle turned.
Gwen stepped in wearing her silk robe, her hair loose around her shoulders.
She looked exactly as she always did at this hour — composed, unhurried, beautiful.
Her eyes moved across the room and landed on Chloe.
Something shifted in her expression.
Just for a moment.
Then it was gone.
"Chloe." Her voice was pleasant.
"It's very late.
Is everything all right?"
"She forgot her bag," I said, before Chloe could speak.
"I asked her to come back for it."
Gwen looked at me.
Then at Chloe.
Then at the desk.
The folded document was still in my hand, pressed flat against my leg, below the desk edge.
"Of course," Gwen said.
She smiled at Chloe.
"Don't make a habit of it.
You need your rest too."
"Yes, Mrs.
Gwen.
I'm sorry."
"Good night, then."
Chloe picked up her coat from the chair near the door — there was, in fact, a coat there, which I was grateful for — and left without looking back at me.
Gwen watched her go.
Then she turned back to me.
"You should sleep, Franklin.
You've been in here for hours."
"I'll be up soon," I said.
She crossed the room and kissed the top of my head.
Her hand rested on my shoulder for just a moment.
Then she left.
I sat completely still until I heard the bedroom door close at the end of the hall.
Then I opened the document again.
The transfer amount was four hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
The destination account had no name attached to it — only a routing number I did not recognize.
The date on the document was two days from now.
I turned it over.
On the back, in pencil, barely visible: a phone number and two words.
*Final confirmation.*
I sat with that for a long time.
Then I opened my desk drawer and found the card my attorney, Gerald Marsh, had given me two years ago.
He had handled my estate planning, my will revisions, my property transfers.
He was seventy himself, old-fashioned, careful.
He did not like Gwen.
He had never said so directly, but I had seen the way he looked at her the one time they were in the same room.
I did not call him that night.
It was past eleven, and I needed to think clearly before I spoke to anyone.
Instead, I photographed the document with my phone.
Both sides.
Then I folded it exactly as Chloe had given it to me and placed it at the very back of the drawer, beneath a stack of old correspondence.
I turned off the desk lamp.
In the dark, I sat and listened to the house.
The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen.
A branch moved against the window.
Somewhere down the hall, behind that closed bedroom door, my wife was either sleeping or waiting to hear my footsteps.
I thought about the charity event where we had met.
How she had laughed at my old stories.
How she had looked at me as though I were still worth looking at.
I had believed it.
Every moment of it.
I stood up slowly, and as I reached the study doorway, I noticed something I had not seen when Gwen came in.
A faint light under the door to the small sitting room across the hall.
It was a room Gwen used occasionally to make phone calls when she wanted privacy.
May you like
The light had not been there when Chloe arrived.
It was there now.
