Second Wife

Chapter 16 — Evidence

The first rule Agent Reyes gave them was simple: change nothing.

“Go on as if you know nothing,” she told them, sitting in Anna’s kitchen with a recorder off and a notebook open. “Pay the bills. Cook dinner. Let him come and go. If he suspects you’re watching, he’ll start destroying things, and I’ll lose the warrant.”

So Anna did. She watched Craig eat her lasagna and ask Jenna about her chemistry test and kiss her forehead before grabbing his overnight bag for “Cleveland,” and she felt the strangest doubling — the man she loved was also, somewhere underneath, a suspect in a federal investigation. The love didn’t leave all at once. It leaked, a little each night, like air from a slow tire.

Beth was braver. “My handwriting is on some of those deposit slips,” she said, pacing Anna’s living room while Jenna was at a friend’s house. “The ones he said were for the kids’ college fund. Reyes says I could be looking at charges myself if I don’t cooperate.”

“Then we cooperate,” Anna said. “We cooperate all the way.”

The evidence work was tedious, and that surprised Anna. She had imagined something cinematic — wiretaps, midnight stakeouts. Instead it was photocopies and timestamps. Reyes gave them both a secure phone and a short list: photograph every account statement before Craig saw it, never move money themselves, and write down everything he said about his clients.

The work changed them, too, in ways Anna hadn’t expected. They developed a rhythm — coffee at Anna’s on Tuesdays, the dining table cleared, both phones face-down, Reyes’s secure line open on speaker. Beth brought her girls’ old math worksheets to use as scratch paper. Anna made the sandwiches. It was the most honest friendship either of them had ever had, built on the strangest foundation imaginable: the man who had betrayed them both.

Beth turned out to be magnificent at it. The former bank teller — a detail Anna had never known — spotted the pattern before Reyes explained it. “Shell vendors,” Beth said, spreading printouts across Anna’s dining table one Sunday in December. Craig was at “a trade show in Indianapolis,” and both women had the house to themselves. “Look. Cole Sales Consulting pays these invoices to Hartwell Logistics and Danner Supply — but those companies don’t exist. The money comes back into accounts under my name and yours as ‘reimbursements.’”

“How much?” Anna asked.

Beth went still. “Four hundred and ten thousand dollars. Over six years.”

The number sat between them like something dead. Four hundred and ten thousand dollars of stolen money had paid for Jenna’s braces and Beth’s youngest daughter’s asthma medication and Christmas trees and new tires. Anna thought of every “bonus” Craig had celebrated, every dinner out he had insisted was his treat, and she felt sick in a way that was also, strangely, clarifying. The man hadn’t been generous. He’d been washing money through their kitchen table.

“There’s something else,” Reyes said at the next meeting, in a coffee shop in Mason where nobody knew them. “Your husband has a meeting in March. A man named Delgado. Our source says it’s a cash drop — the last big one. If we get it on tape, we have the whole chain.”

Anna’s hands shook around her coffee cup. “He wants us to wear wires?”

“Not wires. He just wants you to do what you’d normally do if Craig said he was coming home for dinner on a Tuesday. Be where you are. We do the rest.” Reyes leaned forward. “Ladies, I want you to understand something. You two have given us more in six weeks than a year of surveillance did. The case you built is clean. But it’s the drop that puts him away for a decade instead of three years.”

On the drive home, Beth was quiet for twenty minutes. Then she said, “March fourteenth. He told me he’s in Dayton that week. The girls have a school concert.”

“March fourteenth,” Anna repeated. “Jenna’s birthday is the sixteenth.”

They looked at each other, and in that look was everything: the plan, the risk, the fact that two women who had been married to the same man were now the two people he had most cause to fear.

That night, Anna found the second wedding photo again — the one in Beth’s wallet, which Beth had given her as a kind of proof of surrender. She held it up to the kitchen light. Craig’s face, younger, happier, looking at Beth the way he had once looked at Anna. She didn’t cry. She slid the photo into the evidence envelope Reyes had given her, sealed it, and wrote the date on the flap.

Three months, she thought. In three months, everything ends. She imagined it the way you imagine a storm you’ve been warned about for weeks — you prepare, you board the windows, and still, when it comes, it surprises you.

Upstairs, Jenna was asleep, or pretending to be. Anna stood in her daughter’s doorway for a long moment, watching the rise and fall of the blanket. Sixteen years old, and she had carried the secret first — had seen her father with another woman in a mall and held it inside until it nearly broke her. Anna had spent three months gathering evidence against her husband, and the thing that still made her throat close was the thought of her daughter standing in that food court, sixteen and alone, understanding before her mother did.

She closed Jenna’s door softly and went downstairs and checked the locks twice, the way she did every night now.

And then her phone buzzed with a text from a number she didn’t know: *I know what you’re doing. All of it. — C.*

Her blood went cold. For one long, terrible moment she thought Craig had found them out — that the Delgado drop was blown, that Beth was in danger, that all of it was over.

Then a second text arrived: *Sorry, wrong number. Ignore that lol.*

She stared at the screen for a long time. Wrong number. Probably. Almost certainly.

But her hands were shaking as she set the phone down — because what if it wasn’t?