A mortgage interest statement.
Not for our house.
Different lender.
Different address.
I stared.
“Priya.”
“Yes?”
“There’s another property.”
Silence.
“What kind?”
“I don’t know.”
I read the address aloud.
It was in Evanston.
Twenty minutes north.
“I’ve never seen this address before.”
“Whose name is on the statement?”
I looked closer.
Daniel C. Reed.
My heart started pounding.
“His.”
“Rachel, do not go to the property alone.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
That was a lie.
Because the moment I saw the address, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
I wanted to see it.
Not confront anyone.
Not break in.
Just see it.
Priya asked me to email copies of the documents.
We scheduled an appointment for the next morning.
Before hanging up, she said, “Today may feel like everything needs an answer. It doesn’t. Your job today is information.”
Information.
I wrote the word on a sticky note.
Then placed it beside my laptop.
At noon, Eleanor knocked again.
This time she entered when I opened the door.
She sat in the chair across from my desk.
“I owe you an apology.”
I looked at her.
She didn’t sound rehearsed.
That surprised me.
“For what?”
“For last night.”
I waited.
She folded her hands tightly.
“I believed Daniel when he told me your marriage was falling apart because you cared more about work than family.”
I looked at her shaved reflection in the laptop screen.
“And that made what happened acceptable?”
“No.”
The answer came quickly.
“No, it didn’t.”
Something in my chest loosened by one small degree.
She continued.
“I thought you needed perspective. I thought you were humiliating him.”
“How?”
“By earning more. By traveling. By being…”
She stopped.
“Successful?”
Her face pinched.
“When you say it like that, it sounds ugly.”
“It sounded ugly when you believed it too.”
She nodded once.
To my surprise, she didn’t argue.
“I was raised differently.”
“So was I.”
She looked down.
“My husband made every financial decision in our marriage.”
“Did that make you happy?”
She was silent.
The question seemed to catch her off guard.
