“Perfect,” Maya said, turning back to me with a smile that was terrifyingly sharp. “You are going to go. You are going to wear your best dress. You are going to smile and play the perfect, supportive wife.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t look at him and not scream.”
“You have to,” Maya insisted. “Because I am going to be there too. At a different table. You won’t acknowledge me. When midnight comes, whatever he is planning—and he is planning something—you are going to record it. Everything.”
“Why?”
“Because if he is bold enough to forge federal court documents,” Maya said, “he is bold enough to do something stupid in public. And when he does, we aren’t just going to divorce him. We are going to bury him.”
The next three days were a fugue state of surreal horror.
I moved through my home like a ghost haunting her own life. I watched Marcus meticulously pick out his ties. I listened to him hum in the shower. I watched him text on his phone, angling the screen away from me, smiling at messages I now knew were from Vivian.
He was so convincing. He asked about the gallery. He touched my shoulder when he passed me in the hall. How long had he been practicing this performance? Was our entire marriage just a long con?
On December 29th, Maya’s document examiner confirmed the forgery. “I would stake my license on it in a court of law,” the email read. “This is a crude simulation.”
On December 30th, the violation turned personal.
I was looking for a pair of earrings in my jewelry box when I noticed the velvet slot in the back was empty.
My breath hitched.
My mother had died when I was sixteen. I had sold most of her things to pay for college, but I had kept one piece: a delicate platinum bracelet set with Burmese sapphires. It wasn’t flashy, but the stones caught the light like frozen teardrops. My mother had made me promise to give it to my daughter someday.
I didn’t have a daughter. And now, I didn’t have the bracelet.
