My Husband Used My Fortune to Help His Mistress Poison Me

The storm hit on a Thursday.

I'd been in the new apartment for six days. Six days of bare walls and Barnaby's nails on hardwood floors and the particular silence of a place that doesn't know you yet. I'd been sleeping badly — not because of the pills, I'd stopped taking those the moment I got out — but because every time I closed my eyes I saw Caleb crouched beside my chair at Canlis, his hands wrapped around mine, his eyes wet and convincing.

I knew what I'd seen. I knew what the lot number meant. But knowing a thing and sleeping through the night are two very different problems.

The thunder started around ten. Seattle storms don't ease in — they arrive all at once, like an argument that's been building for days. Rain hammered the windows. The lights in the apartment flickered once, held. Barnaby pressed himself against my feet on the couch and didn't move.

My phone buzzed.

Caleb.

I stared at his name for two rings. Then I picked up.

"Hey." His voice was warm. Careful. "Just wanted to check on you. The storm looks bad on the radar."

In the background, I could hear it — the steady, rhythmic click of a keyboard. Measured. Deliberate.

"I'm fine," I said. "Working late?"

"You know how it is. The Hargrove contracts won't review themselves." A small, self-deprecating laugh. "Don't worry about me. Are you warm enough? The heat in that building can be unreliable, I looked it up—"

"Caleb."

"Yeah."

"I'm fine."

A pause. The keyboard kept clicking. "Okay," he said softly. "Okay. I just needed to hear your voice."

I didn't say anything to that.

"Get some sleep," he said. "I'll talk to you tomorrow."

I set the phone down.

Outside, lightning split the sky — one long, white crack that lit up the street below like a photograph. I wasn't going to look. I had no reason to look.

I looked.

His black Escalade was parked directly across the street.

No lights. Engine off. Just sitting there in the downpour, dark and still, water sheeting off the hood.

I stood at the window for a long moment. My hand found the curtain edge. I didn't move it.

The thunder rolled through, low and continuous, and the street went dark again.

I stepped back from the window. My heart was doing something loud and unpleasant in my chest. I pressed my palm flat against my sternum and breathed through it — four counts in, four counts out — the way my therapist had taught me years ago, back when my mother died and the world stopped making sense.

Caleb had been on the phone with me. Typing. Pretending to be at the office.

While he sat in the rain outside my building and watched my window.

I went to the kitchen. I poured a glass of water I didn't drink. I stood at the counter until my hands stopped shaking.

Then I opened my laptop and found the number I'd written down two days ago.

---

Elias Vance picked up on the second ring, even at that hour. His voice was flat and unhurried, the voice of a man who'd heard worse things than a woman calling during a thunderstorm.

I told him what I needed. Surveillance on Caleb Stone. Movements, meetings, anyone he met privately. Specifically any contact with a woman named Giselle Webb.

"How soon?" he asked.

"Yesterday," I said.

"I'll start in the morning."

I gave him my personal email — not the one linked to any of Caleb's accounts — and we agreed on a check-in schedule. He didn't ask me why. I appreciated that.

After I hung up, I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and Barnaby's head in my lap. The storm kept going. I didn't go back to the window.

---

Elias was efficient. I'll say that for him.

Eight days later, a manila envelope appeared in my mailbox. No return address. Inside were fourteen photographs, printed clean and sharp.

I spread them on the kitchen table.

Caleb and Giselle at a wine bar in Eastlake. Caleb's hand on the small of her back. Giselle's head tilted toward him, her mouth close to his ear.

Caleb and Giselle in the parking structure beneath Stone Capital. Her hand on his lapel. His forehead dropped toward hers.

Caleb holding the door of a private car for her. Giselle looking up at him with an expression I recognized — the particular softness of a woman who knows she has someone.

I looked at every photo. I didn't rush.

He'd told me she was a supplier. A medical contact. Someone he was keeping at arm's length to protect our marriage.

I stacked the photos back into the envelope, sealed it, and put it in the fireproof lockbox under my bed next to the zip-lock bag with the vitamin bottle.

Then I put on my coat and left the apartment.

---

I didn't plan to drink. I just needed to be somewhere with other people and noise and light, somewhere that wasn't four walls that didn't know my name.

I ended up at a lounge on Pine Street — low lighting, jazz from somewhere in the back, the kind of place where nobody looks at you twice. I ordered a whiskey sour. Then another. By the third I'd stopped seeing Giselle's face in the photographs every time I blinked.

I was reaching for my coat when someone said my name.

I turned.

Ashton Carr was standing two feet away, still in his work suit, a glass of something amber in his hand. He looked exactly like I remembered from Reese's birthday two years ago — tall, composed, the kind of face that gave nothing away unless it chose to.

He looked at me the way people look at someone they're quietly relieved to find still standing.

"Claire." His voice was even. Careful. "How are you doing?"

I laughed. It came out shorter than I intended. "Honestly?"

"Honestly."

I looked at him — Reese's brother, the attorney, the man who'd sent me a handwritten card when my mother died because Reese had asked him to and he'd actually done it — and something in my chest loosened one careful degree.

"I've had better months," I said.

He nodded slowly. He didn't offer a platitude. He didn't tell me it would be okay.

He just pulled out the stool beside me and said, "Do you want to sit for a minute?"

I sat.