She studied the envelope.No label.No markings.Just a plain manila envelope sealed shut with tape that had been there long enough to yellow and crack at the edges.
In four years, Lucas had asked her to shred things exactly twice.Both times they were routine administrative documents past their retention dates, which she’d confirmed against the state’s records schedule before destroying them.And she’d had to twist his arm to get him to go through his old records in the first place to pull out useless paperwork and outdated material at all.
What had been important enough to hold in a locked box inside a safe?And why destroy it now?Why the specific instruction to shred itnow?What was the hurry?Something was off about this.
Lucas is hiding something.
And now he was destroying evidence of whatever he was hiding.
Should she do what the boss asked of her without question?She’d always been a good employee, loyal, unquestioning, a hard worker who did her best to make Lucas look good.
But this ...This didn’t feel right.
This felt like the day she’d realized Brent was having an affair.She’d seen little things for a while that weren’t quite right.Brent saying he’d been places she later found out he hadn’t been.Money disappearing from their checking account without explanation.Brent acting distracted and distant, not all there when he interacted with her and the kids.
She ignored all of it.Assumed there was a good explanation for everything.An explanation she wasn’t going to ask for because she trusted her husband and didn’t want to hurt him because she hadn’t trusted him.
She ignored the seed of suspicion stubbornly growing in her belly.Ignored the little voice whispering in her ear that something was wrong.Before she finally gave in and listened to her instincts, they had to shout warnings at the top of their lungs.
It turned out Brent hadn’t even tried to hide the evidence.It was all right there, in their house, the whole time.All she had to do was open her eyes and she would’ve seen it.
The moment she opened Brent’s top dresser drawer, she saw the motel receipts, sales slips from restaurants paying for two meals, even a couple of little love notes whose I’s were dotted with hearts, signed with a row of X’s and O’s above and below the name, Chelsey.
Sitting at her desk now, staring at Lucas’s envelope, a thought exploded across her brain with the force of a bomb.
Had Brent thought she was so gullible and so loyal to him that she would never look through any of his personal things and discover the affair?Or had he just not cared if she caught him?
What if shehadlistened to her intuition sooner?Could she have saved her marriage?Nipped Brent’s affair in the bud before he fancied himself in love with a college co-ed in town for the summer?Would Brent have been at home and off duty the day of the Shoemacher fire and be alive today?
She would never know the answers to any of those questions.And she supposed the answers didn’t matter at this point.Brent was long dead and her marriage had ended the day before the fire killed her husband.
But the same instinct for self-preservation that had shouted at her four years ago, warning her frantically that she was being played for a fool, was shouting the exact same warning at her now.
Except today it was her boss taking advantage of her and assuming she would blindly take him at his word, do as she was told, and not ask any questions.
The shredder sat right behind her desk beside the trash can.All she had to do was turn around and feed the documents into it.No fuss.No muss.No risk.No messy questions.Her life would sail on smoothly, just the way it was now.All she had to do was not rock the boat.
But something—instinct, or that odd look on Lucas’s face, or the voice in her head telling her everything was about to change, the voice she’d desperately been trying to ignore for weeks—told her in no uncertain terms not to shred whatever was in this envelope.
With a glance at Lucas’s closed office door, she slipped the envelope into her big purse and buried it at the bottom of the bag.
She turned on the shredder and picked up a stack of unused printer paper about the same thickness as the envelope.She fed it into the shredder.Its loud whirring and the crunching noise of paper being chopped into tiny slivers filled the office.
The shredder fell silent.
She worked the rest of the day on autopilot.Filed the planning commission minutes.Returned three phone calls.Updated the community calendar.Answered an email from the county about road maintenance funding.Normal things.Ordinary things.The envelope sat in her bag under her desk like a smoldering coal, radiating heat through the leather.
Lucas left before three, which was early even for him.He’d been leaving earlier and earlier since his last doctor’s appointment.He paused at her desk on his way out.
“You took care of the shredding?”he asked gruffly.
“Of course.”
If she’d had any doubt about her decision not to shred the documents before, the flash of abject relief that crossed Lucas’s face followed by a look of smug satisfaction convinced her she’d made the right decision.
“You’re a good girl, Bonnie,” he said with enough condescension to set her teeth on edge.He might as well have said, “Good doggie.Way to obey your master, you stupid mutt.”
She didn’t open the envelope at the office.
