I carried the bucket of warm water and a rag into the hallway to wipe the baseboards behind the home office.

That office door was normally left wide open, but today the wooden frame sat tight against the latch.

I turned the brass knob, expecting it to give beneath my palm.

The metal held firm.

It was locked.

In the three years we’d lived in Oakridge, Patrick had never once locked the home office cabinet or door on a Tuesday morning.

I laid the wet rag on the hardwood floor and leaned in closer to the brass plate.

A thin strip of white paper was caught under the bottom edge of the door, right where the carpet met the hallway threshold.

I pinched the corner of the paper and eased it out slowly so it wouldn’t rip.

It was a bank counter receipt on yellow thermal paper, dated two days earlier.

Forty-five thousand dollars had been transferred from the Sterling Capital main account into a private safe deposit account in the name of Chloe Vance.

The transaction code at the bottom carried Patrick’s personal authorization stamp.

I folded the yellow slip into four little squares and tucked it behind my mother’s photo inside my silver locket.

At one in the afternoon I put on my light wool coat and walked down to the strip mall two blocks from our street.