I told them to get off my porch. Emily had gone pale. Marcus. I never got the company name. It was all through some LLC, some paperwork thing.
You couldn't tell who was really behind it. He glanced at her. But somebody wanted this street, wanted it bad. And now you're telling me the man who took 40 grand in your name, the man following you around, the man who somehow ended up standing outside my house in particular, he's in development buying up properties in this area. The truck was silent except for the road.
"It can't be the same," Emily said, but her voice didn't believe it. "It can't be. That's too That's a coincidence. It has to be." "Maybe." Marcus's hands were tight on the wheel. But you said something last night I keep coming back to.
You said people always tell you who they are. Well, Ryan told you he was in development buying properties in this exact area, and he ended up outside my exact house. And I've got a company. I can't name trying to buy my exact street. He shook his head slowly.
I don't like coincidences, Emily. In my experience, they usually turn out to be somebody's plan. When they got home, Emily went quiet and thoughtful, and then she went to the guest room and came back with her overnight bag, the same one she'd been carrying the night she screamed. She set it on the kitchen table and unzipped it and pulled out a thick folder of documents. "I took these," she said.
The night I left, I grabbed everything I could find in his office before I ran. I didn't even know what half of it was. I just knew it was his and it might matter. I haven't been able to make myself look at it. But if you're right, if there's a connection, she pushed the folder across the table to him.
You're the one who works construction. You'd understand this better than me. Look at it. Tell me I'm being paranoid. Marcus opened the folder.
He went through it slowly, page by page, and Emily watched his face change as he read, watched it go from careful to focused to something cold and hard. There were financial statements. There were property records. There were letters on the letterhead of a development company and purchase agreements and a list, a long-typed list of addresses. Marcus's hands stopped on the list.
What? Emily said, "What is it?" He didn't answer. He was reading the list of addresses. His eyes went down the column, one address after another. All of them on streets.
He knew streets in his neighborhood, the Henderson's address, the empty corner lot, the addresses of half his neighbors. And then near the bottom of the list in plain black type, his own address. His own house. The house they were sitting in. The house with his daughter's drawings on the fridge and his dead wife's photo on the mantle.
It was on the list. It had been on the list the whole time, sitting in a folder in a woman's overnight bag, and neither of them had known. Marcus set the folder down very slowly. Emily," he said, and his voice had gone quiet in a way that was worse than loud. "I need you to look at something, and I need you to tell me the truth about whether you knew." She came around the table and looked where his finger was pointing." She saw the address, and Marcus watched her face, watched it carefully because in that moment, he needed to know one thing above everything else.
Needed to know it in his gut. And her face gave him his answer before her mouth did. She went white. Her hand came up to her mouth. She hadn't known.
Whatever this was, she hadn't known. "That's your house?" she whispered. "Marcus, that's your house. Why is your house on his list?" "That's what I'd like to know," Marcus said. "I didn't know.
I swear to you, I swear on my life, I didn't know he had anything to do with." She was starting to shake. "He never said. He never told me anything about his work, and I thought it was because it was boring." And it wasn't boring at all, was it? He was hiding it. He was hiding it from me the whole time because she stopped.
Her eyes went wide with a horror that was still forming. Marcus, when did I meet him? Do the timing. When did Ryan come into my life? Marcus looked at her.
Four years ago, you said no. She shook her head and now she was shaking all over. No, listen. When did I move here? When did I buy my house across the street from you?
Marcus felt the floor shift under him. You told me you moved here for the job, he said slowly. 3 years ago. I moved here 3 years ago and I met Ryan. Her voice was barely working now.
I met Ryan 2 months after I moved in. He just he was at a coffee shop near my house. He struck up a conversation. I thought it was the luckiest thing meeting somebody so easily in a brand new city where I didn't know a soul. Tears were streaming down her face now, but her voice had gone flat and cold with the dawning of it.
I thought it was luck, Marcus. A handsome man in real estate just happens to strike up a conversation with the new woman who just bought a house on the exact street his company is trying to buy up. I thought it was luck. The kitchen was dead silent. He didn't fall in love with you, Marcus said, and the words felt like lead in his mouth.
He targeted you. You were a homeowner on the street he wanted. He got close to you to get to your house. And when your house wasn't enough, he got close enough to use my credit, my name, my money to fund the rest of it. Emily's legs went weak and she sat down hard in the chair.
Oh my god. Oh my god, Marcus. It was never real. Not one day of it. Four years.
He spent four years running a con and I was the mark and I thought it was love. I planned a wedding. I She couldn't finish. Marcus came around the table and knelt in front of her the way he had that first night on her hallway floor. Hey, he said.