Trespassing(35)

“We’re not going to the school, Ellie-Belle.”

“Yay! To the park?”

“We’re going to the bank.”

She frowns a little. “Oh.”

“They have lollipops.”

She softens a little. “Pink ones?”

“We’ll have to see.” Micah and I have an emergency stash of cash in our safe-deposit box. It isn’t much—a few thousand, maybe five, assuming he hasn’t spent all of it—but it’ll carry us until the death certificate arrives and the insurance comes through. And in order to file for the insurance, I have to find the policy numbers. I’m hoping the paperwork is still in the safe-deposit box, where we stashed it when we moved here from the city.

I hold my daughter a little too closely.

“Mommy? Do you miss Daddy?” She’s staring me right in the eyes. Sometimes, I think she’s too little to comprehend what’s happening, but other times, like now, it’s apparent she knows the permanence of our predicament.

“Yes.” I kiss her baby cheeks. “I will always miss Daddy.”

The ride to the bank is a blur—almost everything is cloudy since Micah left—and the walk to the vault and safe-deposit box isn’t crystal clear, either. But I must’ve turned the key in the lock when the bank manager turned hers because Elizabella and I are now staring into the box.

“Ooooh, pretty,” she coos when I hold up a ring I’ve never seen before. It’s white gold, or platinum maybe, with a pretty bluish-green stone—a fairly large princess-cut set amid a diamond halo.

I don’t know where the ring came from or why Micah would’ve been hiding it in this vault. Unless . . .

A space in my chest warms with a thought: Maybe it’s a final gift from my husband. One he never had the chance to give me.

I pull the ring from its velvet bed and slip it onto my finger, but it’s too small, even for my pinkie. Micah knows my size. If it were a gift, he’d surely have purchased a larger band. Then again, my fingers have been swollen, and I’ve gained a fair amount of weight—upward of twenty pounds at the height of IVF treatment. Maybe he was going to have the ring sized, once my hormones leveled out.

Or maybe he never intended for me to wear it.

Gabrielle.

I stuff the ring back into the cushion, snap the box closed, and drop it into my purse. When I’m up at the lake with Shell, I’ll ask about her friend, Gabrielle. I’ll find out why, if what Claudette says is true, my husband would be talking to Gabrielle in the middle of the night.

But I can’t ponder possibilities now.

Just get what you came for and get out of here.

A few manila envelopes sit at the bottom of the box. I peek into the first, and relief rushes through me. Insurance policies.

The cash is there, too, just as it’s always been, just as it was in our box in the city before we moved here, bound with yellow paper straps. I count them as I place them, too, into my shoulder bag. One, two, three, four, five bundles of tens.

But then I notice something.

The bundles . . . their straps are more mustard than yellow. They aren’t bundles of tens but hundreds. Which means . . .

I’m dizzy for a good half minute.

I have $50,000 in my bag, when I came expecting five.

Fifty thousand dollars.

“Micah,” I whisper. “What were you thinking?”

He may as well have shoved the money under the floorboards! Who, in this day and age, keeps this much cash at the ready? Why wouldn’t he have kept it in a savings account, where it would accrue interest? Or, better yet, in stocks and bonds?

“Mommy.”

“Just a minute, baby.”

And why wouldn’t he have told me how much was here? When we rented the box in the city, we put a few thousand in it, and even then I hadn’t understood the purpose. Micah said it was a good idea to have cash on hand. For emergencies. But $50,000?

Have we always stashed this much away? Or . . . is this the money Micah stole from his father? The money that caused the rift between them?

“Mommy, Nini’s hungry.”

“I’ll get her a lollipop in a second.”

The urge to flee the bank smacks me dead between the eyes, as if I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing. As if this money isn’t really mine, and if I don’t rush out of here—now—someone will either take it from me or take me from it.

The thought is ridiculous, of course, but so is not telling your wife about fifty grand. I was going to simply deposit the cash into our checking account, to use it for bills and necessities until the estate was settled, but now . . . I can’t deposit this much money! How could I explain where it came from? I slip a few hundreds from one of the bundles. I’ll deposit a thousand, maybe two. But the rest, I’ll keep here.

Safe.

Only suddenly, I don’t feel so safe anymore. Our credit cards are all but maxed. There’s not enough in our checking account to carry Bella and me for more than a week. Like it or not, I might need this money.

The image of the man on the eleventh fairway flashes in my mind as if he’s a recurrent memory. The cigarette glowing in the black of night . . .

The voice on the phone that night: Listen to your daughter.

And I can’t help thinking that maybe Micah is gone because of this money. Maybe the man with the cigarette knows what happened. Or maybe he wants what I’ve just dropped into my purse.