Chapter 6 - The Papers Claire Was Carrying Were About Noah
Claire did not have the original folder anymore. It had disappeared along with her purse after the crash.
But before she came to the funeral home, she had managed to get copies from a nurse’s printer using the login information she remembered from a bank email she had saved in her head.
That was so like Claire it hurt.
Even half-injured, half-panicked, and officially dead on paper, she had still been organized enough to rebuild evidence.
She slid three folded pages toward me.
I read them once.
Then again.
My hands began to shake.
The documents were account statements from the educational trust my father had set up for Noah before he died. Claire and I had both been listed as oversight contacts, and after the divorce, we agreed the funds would remain untouched except for tuition, medical care, or future expenses for Noah.
Yet over the last six months, nearly two hundred thousand dollars had been transferred out in increments.
Each transfer carried a digital authorization in my name.
I had never approved a single one.
The receiving entity was a consulting company I had never heard of.
Claire leaned forward.
“I only found out because Noah mentioned that Vanessa kept making him sign things on a tablet when you were away. He said she told him it was for school.”
My stomach turned.
“She used him?”
“I don’t know if the signatures were his, yours, or forged entirely,” Claire said. “But I knew enough to start checking.”
She had spent two weeks quietly tracing the withdrawals with help from a former bank manager she trusted. She was bringing the records to me the day of the crash.
“If I emailed them,” she said, “I was afraid she’d intercept it. If I confronted her alone, she’d destroy everything. I thought if I put them in your hands myself, you’d finally have to see what she was doing.”
The shame hit me harder than the anger.
Because beneath every line on those statements was one terrible truth:
May you like
Claire had still been protecting our son.
And I had been married to the woman stealing from him.
