Chapter 3: What the Shoebox Held
I didn't go back inside that night.
I sat in my car in the parking lot for forty minutes, listening to the two officers talk quietly by their cruiser.
One of them, Officer Reyes, had given me her card at the hospital.
She'd written her personal number on the back.
My phone buzzed.
Mrs.
Calloway again.
"They're still in there.
Skylar, the sister is going through your bedroom.
I can hear drawers."
"Let them," I said.
"There's nothing left to find."
I hung up and looked at my hands.
The skin on my left cheek still felt tight where the burn had been treated.
The doctor had said second-degree.
Mild, he called it.
I had nodded and said nothing, because there was no version of that word that felt mild to me.
Officer Reyes knocked on my window.
I rolled it down.
"We can go back in and remove them from the premises," she said.
"It's your apartment.
Your name is on the deed."
"I know." I looked up at the building.
Third floor, second window from the left.
The light was on.
"Give me five more minutes."
She nodded and stepped back.
I opened the notes app on my phone and read through the list I had typed six weeks ago, sitting in this same parking lot, after Suzanne had called me a leech in my own kitchen while Derek stood there and smiled.
That was when I had started keeping records.
Every transfer I had made to Suzanne: dates, amounts, screenshots.
Forty-three hundred dollars over fourteen months.
Every time Derek had taken cash from the household account without telling me.
Every time he had used the joint card for things I never saw.
Restaurant charges in neighborhoods I had never been to.
Hotel stays on nights he said he was working late.
The shoebox held printed copies of all of it, organized by date, paper-clipped in groups.
It also held a USB drive with the digital originals.
And it held a handwritten note, sealed in an envelope, addressed to my attorney.
I had mailed the copies to my attorney, Diane Marsh, the morning of the incident.
Before the hospital.
Before the police report.
I had driven to the post office at seven forty-five in the morning with coffee still burning my face, and I had dropped the envelope in the slot, and I had felt something settle in my chest that I could not name at the time.
I could name it now.
It was the moment I stopped being afraid of him.
My phone rang.
A number I didn't recognize.
I almost let it go to voicemail.
Then something made me answer.
"Is this Skylar?" A woman's voice.
Older.
Careful.
"Who is this?"
A pause.
"My name is Renata.
I work with Derek.
I've been wanting to call you for a long time."
I sat up straighter.
"Why?"
"Because I know what he's been doing," she said.
"And I don't think you know all of it yet."
May you like
The light in the third-floor window went out.
"Tell me," I said.
