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The screen flared to life. I pulled up his credit card activity. I saw mostly charges to restaurants in New York City. But those a couple of days ago.

Maybe he’d used a different card? I knew of no other he’d use on business besides his Black Card. But there was nothing. No activity since four days ago.

I opened up a browser and typed in the name of Lock’s hotel. I called the front desk.

“Hello,” I said when the desk finally answered. “I’m calling on behalf of my husband, Lock Manning. He’s in the air or he’d call you himself. He’s concerned he might have left his wallet behind. He would have stayed in the penthouse suite. Has anyone recovered it?”

There was a brief pause, then the man came back on the line. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Manning. Mr. Manning checked out early a couple of days ago.”

My heart sank further down. “Thank you,” I heard myself say. He checked out? Lock wasn’t where he said he was. Yet another lie to add to the rest.

I looked at my list of passcodes. There was another place to check. I pulled up the customer site for our cell phone service. Praying he hadn’t set it up for two-factor authentication, I typed in the password.

A moment later, the dashboard popped up. I hovered my finger over the touchpad, then I clicked on recent activity.

Lock had sent a dozen texts over the last forty-eight hours. Though I didn’t have access to the content of those texts except for the ones to me, I could see the outgoing numbers.

I saw my own number, of course. I pulled up my own contacts and cross-referenced several phone numbers and matched them to Lock’s outgoing messages.

There were three texts to Mark’s personal cell.

Four texts to me.

He had incoming texts from all of those numbers, plus several to 800 numbers. I reached for my purse and pulled out one of my credit cards. One of the 800 numbers matched their customer service line. He must have called and reported them stolen to cut me off.

I tracked each line of calls on the cell bill, noting the times. But there was one more piece of information that made my stomach churn. My lungs felt hollow. Three days ago, he received two texts and then placed an outgoing call to the same number that lasted fourteen minutes. I clicked open a browser tab and logged into my LexisNexis account. I did a reverse lookup of the number. It was registered to Corrine Egan.

My blood boiled. I could barely see straight. With shaky legs, I rose from Lock’s desk chair. He was with her. Was he telling her what to do to destroy me? Had I been wrong from the beginning? I assumed Corrine had been breaking into this house. Spying on me. Stealing my underwear. Leaving that dead dove.

Had it been Lock all along? If he hadn’t been in New York for the past three days, where was he?

I heard something down the hall. Footsteps on the marble foyer floor. “Lock?” I called out. He was early.

I walked around the desk and headed toward the sound. I stopped short when I rounded the corner. It had started to rain again. Her hair was plastered to her forehead. She dripped water onto the floor.

“Mina,” Corrine said, smiling. “I was hoping I’d catch you first. We really need to talk.”

FORTY-ONE

“How did you get in here?” I asked, though the question seemed absurd. She’d been getting in here for weeks. Maybe months.

As if she read my mind, Corrine reached into her pocket and pulled out a keychain with a single key dangling from it. She shook it at me and then slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans.

“Where did you get that?”

She cocked her head to the side. “I think you already know.”

She walked right past me toward the kitchen. She had a confident stride, as if she lived here. She went straight to the massive marble-topped island and perched herself on a stool in front of it. I half expected her to offer me something to drink.

“If you don’t leave, I’m calling the police.”

She raised a brow. “You really think you have any credibility left with the Sheriff’s Department?”

“What do you want?”

She rested her chin in her palm. “I want what Lock wants. I want you to pack your stuff and get out of our house.”

She might as well have driven a semi-truck straight into my chest. It got hard to breathe. I walked into the kitchen.