PART 3

The detective’s name was Ruth Okafor, and she was the kind of calm that comes from having seen the worst of people and deciding to stand between them and everyone else anyway.

She met with me and Toby quietly, away from the house.

She looked at Toby’s screenshots. At the synced searches. At the three insurance applications. At the timeline of the “meeting” that was really a hotel twenty minutes away.

Then she was quiet for a long moment.

“Mr. and Mrs. — I’m going to be direct with you both, because you’ve earned directness,” she said. “What you have is chilling, and it’s a great start, and it is not yet enough to guarantee a conviction.

Search history can be explained away by a good lawyer. ‘I was writing a novel. I was worried about my wife’s mental health. Someone else used the account.’

Insurance policies aren’t a crime.

Being twenty minutes from your own house isn’t a crime.

To make this stick — to make sure this man never gets a second attempt, on you or anyone else — we need him to act, or speak, in a way that removes all doubt.

And that means, Mrs. Ashcombe, that the most dangerous thing you can do right now is let him know you’re afraid.”

So began the hardest two weeks of my life.

I went home to a man who had come to kill me, and I made him coffee.

I let him hug me though he smelled, in my memory, of that disinfectant.

I laughed at his jokes. I asked about his fake meeting. I performed the role of a wife who suspected nothing, while Detective Okafor’s team quietly did what they needed to do — the legal, careful, patient work of building a case that would hold.

I won’t detail their methods, because that’s their business and not mine to broadcast. But I’ll tell you what I did, because it’s the part I’m proud of.

I stopped being a victim and became a witness.

Under Okafor’s guidance, I paid attention. I noticed. I remembered. I documented my own life the way you’d document a crime scene, because it was about to be one, and I was determined that if my husband ever tried again, or ever spoke the truth of what he’d done, there would be a clean, admissible record of it.

I also learned why.

Toby and I, digging together through the financial records I had access to as co-owner of everything, found it.

Christopher was ruined.

The successful businessman I’d married had made a series of catastrophic investments, hidden them from me, and burned through most of his own money and a frightening amount of debt. He’d forged my signature on loans — Toby found those too. He was months from total collapse, from me discovering everything, from a divorce that my father’s ironclad prenup would have left him with nothing from.

He didn’t need me gone because he’d stopped loving me.

He needed me gone because I was worth twenty-four million dollars dead, and nothing to him alive.

I had become, to my husband of fourteen years, a math problem.