Chapter 5
Three days passed.
Three of the longest days of my life.
The police had searched Natalie’s apartment thoroughly.
They found more than we had.
Bank accounts we didn’t know existed.
Passports under three different names.
A burner phone with numbers for men in four different states.
Each one, it seemed, a former mark.
The FBI got involved.
Because this wasn’t just a local assault case anymore.
This was interstate fraud.
Conspiracy.
Possibly even racketeering.
Natalie wasn’t just a gold digger.
She was the head of an operation.
And the more they dug, the deeper it went.
Jackson had moved back into the house.
He said he couldn’t stand to be in the apartment alone.
I think he just needed to be near me.
We ate dinner together every night.
We talked about Frank.
We talked about the old days.
We didn’t talk about Natalie unless we had to.
But she was there anyway.
In the empty space at the table.
In the silence between sentences.
In the way Jackson checked the locks three times before bed.
On the fourth day, the doorbell rang.
Judith answered it.
She came back into the kitchen looking confused.
“There’s a woman here to see you,” she said. “Says her name is Maria. Says she was Natalie’s housekeeper for two years.”
I looked at Jackson.
He stood.
“Send her in.”
Maria was small and quiet, with deep lines around her eyes and calloused hands.
She carried a large cardboard box.
She set it on the kitchen table.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, her accent thick. “But when I saw what happened on the news… I knew I had to come. I kept these things. I didn’t know why at the time. I just… I knew they were wrong.”
She opened the box.
Inside were letters.
Cards.
A laptop.
And dozens of cassette tapes.
“Natalie recorded everything,” Maria said. “Every phone call. Every meeting. Every conversation she had with her… partners. She thought she was building evidence to protect herself. But she was stupid. She left the key to the filing cabinet where I could find it. I copied it all before she fired me last month.”
“Fired you?” Jackson asked.
“I saw something I shouldn’t have,” Maria said. “A man came to the apartment. Not you, Mr. Westbrook. Another man. They were arguing about money. About you. About the wedding. Natalie said you were ‘almost there.’ That the wedding was in two weeks and then they’d be rich. The man said he wanted his share. Natalie said he’d get it when she got hers. I was cleaning the bedroom. They didn’t know I was there. She fired me the next day. Said I was stealing silverware. I never stole anything.”
She pushed the box toward us.
“It’s all in there,” she said. “The truth. About all of it. I don’t want anything for it. I just… my son is your age, Mr. Westbrook. I wouldn’t want anyone to do to him what she did to you.”
She left as quietly as she had come.
Jackson and I stared at the box.
Neither of us moved.
“Where do we start?” he asked finally.
“Start with the laptop,” I said.
It took Arthur three hours to get past the encryption.
When he did, what we found changed everything.
Natalie hadn’t acted alone.
She had a partner.
A man named Marcus Webb.
And he wasn’t just a partner.
He was her husband.
They had never divorced.
The marriage to Richard Voss had been real, yes.
But the marriage to Marcus?
That had happened two years after the divorce from Richard.
Secretly.
In a small town in Nevada.
No witnesses.
No announcement.
Just a marriage license and a plan.
Everything Natalie had done to Jackson, she had done with Marcus.
They had planned it together.
Every step.
Every manipulation.
Every lie.
The emails went back three years.
**Marcus: Gala is tomorrow. You sure he’ll be there?**
**Natalie: Positive. His assistant confirmed. He’s vulnerable. Still crying about Daddy. Easy target.**
**Marcus: Don’t get greedy. We do this slow. One year minimum before engagement. Two before wedding. Can’t rush the mark.**
**Natalie: Relax. I know what I’m doing. I’ve done this before, remember?**
**Marcus: Voss was small potatoes. This is 120 million. No mistakes.**
**Natalie: There won’t be. By the time he figures it out, we’ll be in the Caymans drinking margaritas on our yacht.**
There were hundreds of them.
Page after page.
Detailing every stage of the con.
How to push Jackson’s buttons.
How to isolate him.
How to make him believe he was nothing without Natalie.
And the worst part?
Marcus had been there the whole time.
He had been the caterer’s assistant at the engagement party.
He had been the photographer at the bridal shower.
He had been the bartender at the rehearsal dinner.
He had watched.
He had listened.
He had reported back to Natalie every detail of our behavior.
He had been in my house.
He had shaken my hand.
He had smiled at me while planning my destruction.
I felt physically ill.
Jackson was quiet.
Too quiet.
He scrolled through the emails, his face impassive.
Then he opened the audio files.
Hundreds of them.
Recorded phone calls.
Conversations in the apartment.
He clicked on one dated the night of the rehearsal dinner.
Natalie’s voice filled the kitchen.
*“The dementia angle is solid. I’ve got three fake doctors who will sign whatever we want. The caregivers are paid off. By the time the toast is over tomorrow, everyone in that room will think she’s a senile old woman who belongs in a home. Jackson will sign the guardianship papers within a week. The money will be ours by the end of the month.”*
Marcus’s voice answered.
*“And the head-shaving thing? You sure that’s not too much?”*
*“It’s perfect,”* Natalie said, laughing. “It breaks her. Publicly. And it gives us the perfect excuse to say she’s violent and self-destructive. Two birds, one stone. Trust me. I’ve thought of everything.”
Jackson stopped the recording.
He closed the laptop.
He stood.
He walked out of the room.
I found him in the backyard.
He was standing at the edge of the pool where Frank had taught him to swim when he was four years old.
He was holding something in his hand.
The wedding ring.
The one Natalie had dropped on the ballroom floor.
He had picked it up after she left.
I don’t know why he had kept it.
“She told me she loved me,” he said without turning around. “Every night. For three years. She told me I was the only thing that mattered. And every word of it was being typed into an email to her real husband ten minutes later.”
I walked to him.
I put my hand on his shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, baby.”
“Did Dad ever make you feel like this?” he asked. “Like you couldn’t breathe without him?”
“Every day,” I said. “And still, every day since he died.”
“Then how do you do it?” he asked, turning to me. His face was wet with tears. “How do you go on when the person you built your whole life around was never real?”
I pulled him to me.
“You remember who you were before them,” I said. “You remember that you were a whole person all on your own. That they didn’t complete you. They just… temporarily distracted you from the work of living.”
I looked out over the water.
“Your father used to say that pain is just the price of admission for having loved deeply,” I said. “The deeper the love, the worse the pain when it’s gone. But here’s the thing about you, Jackson Westbrook. You loved deeply. Even if she didn’t deserve it. Even if it was all a lie. The love you felt was real. And that says everything about you, and nothing about her.”
He held me tight.
For a long time, we just stood there.
Then Arthur called from the kitchen.
His voice was urgent.
“You two need to hear this,” he said.
We walked back in.
He had queued up another audio file.
This one was dated the morning after the wedding.
After Natalie had been arrested.
After she had been booked and processed.
It was a call from the jail.
To Marcus.
*“They have the apartment,”* Natalie said. Her voice was tight, controlled. No panic. “They have the files. The timeline. Everything.”
*“So we run,”* Marcus said. “I’ve got the passports. The Cayman accounts are still clean. We can be on a plane in three hours.”
*“No,”* Natalie said. “We don’t run. We fight. They think they’ve won because I’m in here. That’s the mistake. They’ll get complacent. They’ll let their guard down. And that’s when we hit them where it hurts.”
*“Natalie, they’ve got enough evidence to put you away for twenty years—”*
*“Let them try,”* she said. “I’ve got one more card to play. Something Eleanor never saw coming. Something that will destroy the Westbrook name forever. And when the dust settles, the money will be ours. All of it. Every last dollar Frank Westbrook ever made.”
She paused.
*“And tell Jackson,”* she said, her voice dropping to a purr. “Tell him the baby’s due in seven months. And it’s definitely his.”
The recording ended.
The kitchen was silent.
I looked at Jackson.
May you like
He had gone completely still.
“The baby,” he whispered.
