“What?”
“You heard me. You. Fucked. My. Husband.”
Hailey’s lungs seemed to collapse in on themselves. She felt as if she was flying backward through the garage, even as she was frozen in place. “Rebekah, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Fighting the paralysis in her legs, she backed toward the door that led to the elevators. Rebekah followed her.
“He called me, you know. David called me just to tell me that he’d fucked my lawyer.Mylawyer, the one who’s supposed to be on my side. How could you be so stupid?”
“Listen to me, I—”
“Itoldyou. I told youexactlywhat he was. You’re such a snot, sitting up there in your fancy office, thinking you know everything. Are you going to tell the other lawyers that you screwed the guy who’s screwing all of them? Was that your plan to get your money back?” As Rebekah’s laugh echoed around the concrete, Hailey heard a car pull into the parking garage. Someone was going to see them. Anyone could be listening. She was torn between getting back in her car and running into the building. Could she lock the stairwell door behind her? Rebekah Rainier loose in the halls of Arthur, Clarke & Straus was the only thing that could be worse than this.
“He’s never going to pay you, you stupid bitch,” Rebekah said, with an expression that looked almost like joy. “It’s a game to him, don’t you see that?”
Hailey said a silent prayer to all the unfaithful spouses who’d parked in this very garage, and she followed their lead: “Rebekah, I honestly don’t know what you are talking about. I certainly didn’t sleep with your husband—or your estranged husband or whatever he is—no matter what he may have told you. You can’t go around making crazy accusations without anything to back them up.”
Hailey hoped to God that Rebekah didn’t have anything to back them up.
“Uh-huh,” said Rebekah. “You just keep right on lying and see where it gets you.” She was close to Hailey now, and very tall. Her face was threatening to bust free of its Botox shell; Hailey could see faint frown lines and an angry almost-wrinkle slashing its way down the center of her forehead. “He set you up, and you played right into his hands,” Rebekah went on. “And you go ahead, keep right on lying till you’re blue in the face, but I wouldn’t be surprised if David has proof. I’d watch that back of yours, and maybe in the future stay off it.”
Hailey turned away and ducked into the musty stairwell. The heavy door swung shut of its own accord, and like a child, Hailey pushed her body weight against it. No resistance came from Rebekah, though after a minute a man Hailey recognized from the insurance agency on the top floor appeared through the glass panel in the door. Hailey had no choice but to let him in. If he’d heard the angry exchange, he didn’t let on.
Hailey felt she might suffocate on the elevator ride. David had never called her. He hadn’t emailed or texted a single word since that night. She’d been so wrapped up in Mack, so busy telling herself that she’d deal with Davidlater, that she hadn’t considered what his own silence might mean. Surely he was just being a gentleman, just waiting for her to set the tone of what had occurred between them? Because Rebekah had to be wrong; there was no way that he had set her up. Hailey was much too smart to have misread him, much too clever to let herself become a pawn in some millionaire’s divorce battle.
It was simply not a possibility.
By the time Hailey reached her office, she had decided to send him a text. It was safer than email somehow, less official:Hello David, can we speak today? Give me a call when you can.It was the first message between them—she only had his number in her phone from the day he’d called her at the pool—so should she sign her name?
She did not.
She took the statement from Sunshine Enterprises out of her bag and, taking a Sharpie from her desk, blacked out hers and Mack’s names and their address from the top of the page. Then, casting a glance down the hallway to make sure Rebekah wasn’t in the reception area, she made her way past rock-star paralegal Marla’s desk, past Straus’s and Clarke’s offices, to the L-shaped corridor that housed the firm’s two researchers-for-hire. Dennis—the one she was looking for, the only one who would do for this task—was hunched over a Dunkin’ Donuts mug, glasses fogged from the steam coming out of it. He straightened at the sight of her, mumbled something that must have been hello. If she’d met him on the street, Hailey would have put his age at no more than sixteen.
“I need you to do something for me, Dennis.” Hailey didn’t trust her voice with pleasantries; the shock of Rebekah’s assault was still ricocheting through her nervous system. She set the statement from Sunshine Enterprises in front of him. “Can you please find out everything you can about this company?”
Dennis frowned—God, he really was almost prepubescent—and Hailey nearly lost it as he googled the company right in front of her. There were fifteen million results.
They locked eyes. On some fundamental level Hailey needed him to be afraid of her, and, wrapped in the warm blanket of self-preservation that was his generation’s instinct, Dennis was not about to oblige.
“I need more to go on if you want me to narrow this down at all,” he said with a shrug.
“I’m aware of that,” Hailey snapped. “I was about to tell you—in strict confidence—that I need you to find out if there is a connection between a company by this name and David Rainier.” She put her hand out to stop him as he went to amend his google search. “And let me be clear: I really need you to keep this line of investigation between us.”
He seemed to perk up a little at the subterfuge. “I don’t remember seeing this company name when we analyzed his financials.”
“No, I know. I’m just wondering about the amounts—can you match them up with money flowing through his accounts?”
“I can’t access a third party’s statements,” said Dennis flatly, but they both knew this was not true. In the thick of Rebekah’s divorce proceedings, the kid had submitted two files of research on David Rainier to Marla and Hailey: one contained legally obtained material that was usable in court, the other was only to be used for reference purposes and never shared outside the firm. Dennis, Marla had told Hailey back then, was a bona fide hacker. At the time, Hailey had been unimpressed—what researcher his age wasn’t? But now she really needed him to be something special.
“Maybe if you give me the account these were paid into,” he was saying, looking down at the statement. “If I had that, I could possibly—and I’m speaking sort of like hypothetically here—get the details on the payer.”
“They were checks,” said Hailey. “Does that matter?”
“Checks?”
“Yes, like paper checks.” She had a sudden recollection of an Instagram reel about teenagers struggling to dial rotary phones. “Checks that come in the mail and you deposit in your bank account.”
“Right. No, I don’t think it would matter. Although a check would have account numbers on it that we could trace, maybe a bank address—”
“I don’t have that. The checks were already deposited.” Thanks to Hailey’s greedy husband and her busybody father, those serial numbers were now the property of National City Bank. And as much as she hated to admit it, she just wasn’t sure that Mack was wrong to be wary of red-flagging the strange payments.
