Chapter 2 - The Brown Accordion File
The door to the second bedroom clicked shut behind me.
The room smelled of Walter’s menthol ointment and Diane’s lavender talcum powder. My ergonomic swivel chair had been pushed into the closet, covered by Diane’s winter coats. My dual-monitor setup sat unplugged on the high shelf above the coats, looking abandoned. Where my drafting table used to be, Walter’s massive leather recliner dominated the space, angled directly toward a television they had installed without asking.
I knelt beside the cedar chest at the foot of the queen bed.
The brown accordion file was thick, bulging with thirty-one years of organized receipts: dental bills from 1998, warranty cards for appliances long sent to scrap heaps, and neat bundles of carbon receipts held together by dried-out rubber bands.
I flipped through the tabs. Taxes. Insurance. Home Sale.
Under Home Sale, tucked behind the closing documents for their split-level home in Rockford, Illinois, was a certified bank receipt dated November 14th of the previous year.
The amount made my vision blur: $60,000.00.
Payee: Hartley Holdings LLC.
The remitter: Walter Hartley.
And stamped on the back of the customer carbon copy was a handwritten routing number and account number, followed by Mark’s unmistakable, looping signature accepting the wire transfer into an account I had never seen before in my life.
I pulled out my phone, angled the camera directly above the document under the weak ceiling light, and snapped four high-resolution photos. Then I zoomed in on the account details.
Hartley Holdings LLC.
Mark worked in mid-level pharmaceutical logistics. He didn't own a company. He had never filed corporate taxes to my knowledge, and every spring we sat together at the dining table with TurboTax, filing jointly under the simple W-2 forms we both received.
Or rather, I filed our W-2s while he complained about how much the state of Illinois took out of his paycheck.
My hands did not shake as I slid the carbon paper back into its slot and retied the string around Walter’s file. My mother’s voice echoed in my head from twenty years ago, sitting in the back of her rusted Civic after twelve hours of scrubbing rich people's baseboards: When someone takes what’s yours, Rachel, you don't scream at them. You find the lock, you find the key, and you take it back when they’re looking the other way.
I left the bedroom, closing the door softly.
In the hallway, the ironing board stood against the bedroom wall like a monument to my humiliation. On top of it sat my company-issued ThinkPad, surrounded by a tangle of charging cords and an external mouse resting on a cardboard coaster.
I opened the laptop and dialed Priya’s direct extension on our internal messaging app.
She answered on the second ring, her screen showing her home office in Lincoln Park—a room with four tall windows, built-in mahogany shelves, and zero ironing boards.
“Ra? Aren't your Singapore meetings done until tonight?”
“Priya,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “Do you remember that attorney you mentioned back in August? Joanne Feld?”
Priya’s pen froze mid-air over her notebook. Her eyes snapped to the camera. “What happened?”
May you like
“Nothing yet,” I said. “Can you get me an appointment for two o'clock this afternoon?”
“I can get you an appointment for noon,” Priya said without hesitation. “Pack your laptop and leave through the back stairwell. I’m picking you up at the corner of Damen.”
