I felt his fingers close around my wrist. Gently. Almost tenderly. He lifted my hand off the blanket and pressed my thumb against the glass of my own phone.
The phone unlocked.
He was quiet for a long time. I could hear him tapping, scrolling. Mail. Photos. Messages. Notes.
My heart was going so hard I was certain he could hear it.
But Ray had warned me. On the day I called him, he'd told me to send every picture from the suitcase to a private email address, delete them from my phone, and empty the trash. He'd said, "Assume he'll look."
My photo library held nothing but Eli and Fourth of July.
After a minute, Derek let out a soft breath. He set my hand down on the blanket, laid the phone back on the nightstand, and lay down beside me.
"Nothing," he whispered to himself.
I lay in the dark, next to a man who had just pressed my sleeping thumb to my own phone like a fingerprint at a crime scene, and I did not move a muscle until the sun came up.
The last piece came from something I had noticed months ago.
You'll remember I told you about the charges in Derek's business books. The ones that didn't match any vendor. The ones that were always just under five thousand dollars.
I had seen them for months. I had never said a word. Now that I finally understood what my husband was capable of, I sat down at my desk on Tuesday, the tenth of November, and I really looked.
It wasn't hard. I'd spent six years doing exactly this.
The payments went to a company called ProLine Sports Group. Since March, there were thirty-nine of them. Forty-eight hundred. Forty-nine hundred. Forty-eight fifty. Never over five thousand, because five thousand is where the bank starts asking questions.
I added them up on a yellow legal pad, the way my father used to.
One hundred eighty-seven thousand, four hundred dollars.
"Sports betting," I said aloud, to the empty office. It was a small, flat, unsurprised sound. "Oh, Derek."
He hadn't been expanding his business. He hadn't been saving for trucks. He'd been feeding an app on his phone, night after night, while I slept, and then hiding the losses one small transaction at a time.
And then in September, something else showed up on the credit card statement. On September tenth, the card, which had been nearly maxed out, was paid down by one hundred thirty-eight thousand dollars, in a single ACH transfer from an account I had never seen.
I frowned. Where did a hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars come from?
That was when I remembered Labor Day weekend.
Derek had driven his mother up to Erie on Friday, September fourth, to stay with her sister Patrice. I remembered because Lorraine had texted me a photograph of the two of them on the pier, squinting into the wind, holding ice cream cones. She'd stayed the whole weekend. Derek picked her up on Monday.