The Apartment Invoice Gave My Husband A Second Front Door

“Don't drive over there,” Yvette said.

I had not said I wanted to. She had seen my face when I read the apartment note.

“A door won't tell you where the money came from,” she added. “The invoice might.”

She asked Nolan's bookkeeper for the source documents behind that row. The bookkeeper sent the request to Nolan, who replied that reasonable business records could be released.

He must have thought the expense would protect him.

Two days later, we had a furnished apartment lease in Midtown. The rent was $1,800 a month. North Meridian paid it. Tessa Vale was the resident, and Nolan had signed as guarantor.

“Maybe she really traveled,” I said.

Yvette nodded. “Let's leave that question open.”

Tessa presented traveling science programs. I found a public schedule with stops in Columbia, Springfield, and small towns across Missouri.

Then I found a brochure for her dome show.

My pictures filled the page. My script had become a program “developed by Tessa Vale with Nolan Shaw.”

I knew those pictures down to the bright edge of a moon I had painted on a rainy Sunday.

“I thought he was selling my work,” I told Beth. “He was selling someone else as the person who made it.”

Beth saved the brochure with its date and web address.

“We'll ask for the agreements behind that, too.”

My first urge had been to post the whole thing online. I wanted people to see what he had done before he explained me away.

Instead, I sent Beth the file.

At the center, I ran a morning show about winter skies. A boy pointed at Orion and called him a crooked shopping cart. I laughed for the first time in days.

Then I went back into the booth and cried where the glass hid my face.

My supervisor, June, knocked once.

“Bad day?”

“Bad math.”

She stood beside me without asking for details.

“Take your lunch,” she said. “The stars can wait twenty minutes.”

On Thursday, Nolan's bookkeeper sent a larger export. It covered eighteen months. She wrote that Nolan had approved sending the sales ledger, but bank statements would follow separately.

Yvette called me after dinner.

“Bring your reading glasses if you use them.”

“I don't.”

“Then bring a sandwich. We'll be here a while.”

We sat beneath a lamp in her office. Rain pressed against the window. She laid out the ledger in date order.

It listed $312,000 in customer receipts.

I did the first piece of math myself.

“Forty percent is $124,800.”

“And you've received $4,800.”

“So he owes me $120,000.”

“If the deposits support this ledger. These are still his entries. We verify them.”

She sounded cheerful, almost pleased. I began to understand why people who hid things might fear her.

She never rushed past an empty space.

The ledger showed eighteen apartment payments totaling $32,400. It also showed transfers totaling $141,600 to an account labeled Reserve.

“He said we owed forty-seven thousand,” I said.

Yvette pushed a box of tissues toward me but did not stop working.

“Bring the actual debt statements next.”

I asked Nolan for them that night.

“Why? So your accountant can charge us to read envelopes?”

“Because I'm supposed to owe half.”

He opened a drawer, shut it, then said he needed time.

I ordered copies for the accounts in my name. Beth requested the rest through his lawyer. The balances we could confirm added to $6,800, all on one joint card.

There was no matching stack of bills for the other $40,200.

When I asked about Tessa, Nolan sat very still.

“She's part of the touring operation.”

He said it in the same voice he used for mileage and printer paper. I asked whether the lease had an end date. He said that was a business question. I asked why my name was missing from the brochure. He said customers wanted one clear point of contact.

“An author isn't a contact number,” I said.

He looked toward the sink, where two breakfast plates still waited. For once, he had no useful task to give me.

“Do you stay there?”

He rubbed his mouth.

“Sometimes.”

“With her?”

“Things have been difficult here.”

That was the nearest he came to an answer, but it was enough. I had spent months trying to make our home cheaper. He had paid for another place to go.

I moved into the center's guest room for two nights, with June's permission, then rented a small room from a colleague. I took my clothes, my box, and copies of our records.

On Monday, Beth began preparing divorce papers and a separate contract claim against Nolan and North Meridian.

That evening, Nolan called.

“Tell your people to back off,” he said. “I'm closing North Meridian's accounts Friday. After that, good luck finding money in an empty company.”