Someone Exactly Like You

Chapter One: Insurance

The note was taped to her windshield at eye level, dead center, where she couldn't miss it.

Renee Colton stood in the parking deck under the Farrow & Leland building with her key fob in one hand and her briefcase in the other, and she did not touch the paper for a long moment. It was ordinary printer paper, folded twice, sealed to the glass with a strip of silver duct tape. Someone had wanted the tape to be visible. Someone had wanted her to see the effort.

Around her the deck hummed with fluorescent light. Level three, space 118, the same space she had parked in for six years. The concrete smelled of exhaust and rain.

She peeled the tape off. It took the top layer of grime with it.

The handwriting was small and neat, almost polite.

$340,000. Your husband knows the number. Ask him what he plans to do about it. We would rather talk to him than to you.

No signature. No phone number. Nothing to trace, nothing to report, nothing an officer could do anything with beyond taking a statement and filing it.

Renee read it four times. On the fourth reading her hands began to shake, not from fear exactly but from the sensation of a floor she had believed solid turning out to be a sheet of paper stretched over a hole.

Three hundred forty thousand dollars.

She was thirty-four years old, an estate-planning attorney, and she spent her working life explaining to other people how money moved after a person's life stopped. She knew what $340,000 was. It was the equity in a house. It was a decade of careful saving. It was more than she and Mark had ever had at one time.

She sat in the driver's seat with the door open and the note flat on her thigh and she opened her banking app.

The joint savings account had a balance of $41.17.

Eleven months ago it had held sixty-one thousand dollars. She had checked it in March, before the trip to Charleston that they never took, and it had been fine, it had been more than fine, she had felt a small warm satisfaction looking at the number and had gone back to her billable hours.

She scrolled. Transfers out. Not one dramatic withdrawal but dozens, hundreds—four hundred here, twelve hundred there, all of them to an account labeled with a string of digits she didn't recognize. The oldest was fourteen months back.

She went to the mortgage portal next. She had to reset the password because Mark handled it. She had let him handle it because he liked handling things, because it was the one domestic task he volunteered for, and because early in their marriage she had learned that arguing about small things cost more than the small things were worth.

There were two loans against the house on Delvin Street.

The second had been originated eight months ago. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Her signature was on the documents, or something that looked enough like her signature to satisfy a closing agent who wanted to get to lunch.

Renee sat very still in the parking deck for eleven minutes. Then she took her phone and photographed the note, front and back, with the deck's numbered pillar visible in the frame. She photographed the mortgage document on her screen. She photographed the savings account. She put all of it in a folder she had created two years earlier, buried three menus deep inside a photo-vault app, protected by a passcode Mark did not know.

The folder was called Insurance.

It already had nine items in it.

---

Mark Colton was in the kitchen when she got home, and he was in a good mood, which was worse.

He had come off a twelve-hour shift at St. Ambrose and he still had that emergency-medicine electricity in him, the thing that had made her fall in love with him at twenty-three when he was a resident with three days of stubble and a talent for making dying people laugh. He was searing chicken thighs in the cast iron. He had music on. He kissed her temple as she came in and said, "You look like somebody sued you."

"Somebody taped this to my car."

She put the note on the counter, in the clean space beside the cutting board.

She watched his face. That was the part she would remember later—not the shouting, not what came after, but the eight seconds in which her husband of eleven years read a threat about $340,000 and his face performed a series of small calculations before it landed on wounded confusion.

"What is this?"

"That's what I'm asking you."

"Renee, I don't—" He picked it up, turned it over. "This is somebody's idea of a joke. Or a scam. They do this, they pick a name off a—"

"The savings account has forty-one dollars in it."

The tongs went down on the counter.

"There's a second mortgage on the house," she said. "Recorded in June. A hundred and fifty thousand. My signature is on it and I have never seen it in my life."

The good mood drained out of the room like water out of a tub. What replaced it was not anger, not yet. It was something flatter and more frightening: assessment. He was working out how much she knew.

"I was going to tell you."

"When."

"When I had it handled." He turned the burner off. "It's handled, Renee. It's mostly handled. There's a guy—"

"Jerry Poletti."

That stopped him. She had found the name six weeks ago in his coat pocket, on the back of a receipt from a sports bar in Sandston, next to a figure with a lot of zeros. She had photographed that too and put it in the folder and told herself it was nothing.

"How do you know that name?"

"Is it three hundred forty thousand dollars?"

"It's not that simple—"

"Is it three hundred forty thousand dollars, Mark?"

"Yes." He said it fast, the way you rip a bandage. "Yes. It was ninety. It was ninety and then the vig—the interest, it's weekly, it compounds, it's not a bank, you can't—" He stopped. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "I had a system. I did. I was up two hundred grand in September, I could show you the—"

"Up. You were up."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"That voice. That courtroom voice, like I'm a—" He laughed, and it was ugly. "You know what it's like, coming home to a prosecutor every night?"

"You forged my name on a mortgage. That's a felony. Do you understand that's a felony? Not a mistake. A felony that I could be asked about by the Virginia State Bar."

She should have stopped there. She knew the shape of the slope she was standing on—she had learned it over four years, the way a person learns the sound a floorboard makes. But there was something in her that night that had come loose in the parking deck and would not tighten back down.

"We're going to sell the house," she said. "We're going to sell it and pay what we can and then I want you to move out until—"

He crossed the kitchen faster than she could finish the sentence.

He did not hit her. He never hit her; that was the technicality he lived inside. He took her by the upper arms and drove her backward, and the back of her head and her right shoulder met the wall between the kitchen and the hall, and the drywall made a sound like a cracker breaking.

For a second there was nothing in her but white noise.

"You are not selling my house," he said, very close to her face. His breath was coffee and something under it. "You don't get to—you have no idea what they'll do. You have no idea what I'm holding off. I'm holding it off, Renee. Me."

Her shoulder was a bright bar of pain. She made herself go slack, because slack ended it faster.

And then, on schedule, the second act.

His hands opened. He stepped back and looked at his own palms as if they'd been loaned to him by someone else. His face collapsed. He sat down on the kitchen floor, right there on the tile with the chicken burning behind him, and he cried—big, shuddering, genuine sobs, and he said her name over and over, and he said he was sick, he said he knew he was sick, he said he would go to a meeting, he would go tomorrow, he would go tonight if she wanted, he would do anything, he would kill himself before he hurt her again.

And Renee stood against the cracked wall with her shoulder screaming, and she felt the old, awful softening. Because he meant it. That was the thing nobody understood about Mark. He meant every word of it, every time.

She crouched down and put her hand on his head, because that was what she did, and he held on to her waist and wept into her skirt.

Later, when he had taken a Klonopin and gone to sleep, Renee stood in the hall in her bathrobe and photographed the crack in the drywall with a tape measure held beside it for scale. Then she went into the bathroom, turned sideways to the mirror, pulled her robe off her shoulder, and photographed the four purple ovals coming up on her arm where his fingers had been. Then the back of her head, angled awkwardly, the lens finding the tender spot.

Timestamped. Filed.

Insurance, item ten.

She sat on the edge of the bathtub afterward with the phone dark in her hands, and she thought a thought she had thought before, but never so cleanly, never so much like a sentence:

If he died, it would all be over.

Not divorce. Not a protective order, not sixty days of hearings, not half her earnings, not the Bar inquiry, not the men who wrote polite notes in silver tape. If Mark simply stopped existing—an aneurysm, a car on I-64, a needle stick, anything—then the debt died with him and the house was hers and the folder on her phone could be deleted and she could be thirty-four years old and free.

She was ashamed of the thought for about ninety seconds.

Then she brushed her teeth and went to bed beside him, because in the morning she had a nine o'clock with a widow about a charitable remainder trust, and because there was nowhere else to go.