I walked to the kitchen counter and picked up the sealed envelope I had placed there two hours earlier.
Then I returned to the head of the table and set it in front of Daniel.
“The payment arrived today,” I said. “Congratulations.”
He grabbed it before I had finished the sentence.
His fingers moved fast, tearing the flap with the eagerness of someone who had been waiting a long time for a thing and could not manage his own anticipation.
His eyes hit the first sheet and went to the numbers immediately, because that is where a man like Daniel always looks first.
Then his face changed.
The photographs were first.
Richard’s team had arranged them chronologically. Fourteen meetings at the Kimpton. The corner table. The car parked at Rebecca’s building. Date and timestamps on every frame.
Then the financial summary.
The three hundred forty thousand dollars moved in staged transfers across eight months. Account numbers. Routing documentation. The offshore destination account with Daniel’s signature on the authorization.
Then the transcript.
Four minutes and twelve seconds, word for word.
I had formatted it cleanly, like a script.
Daniel.
Rebecca.
Daniel.
Every line attributable and unambiguous.
His voice. Her laugh. The line about my body not working the way it should sitting there on the page in twelve-point Times New Roman, the most casual line of the conversation, the one I knew would follow him.
The color left his face the way water drains from a bathtub, not all at once, but in a steady, inevitable direction.
Rebecca had gone completely still.
She was looking at the photographs with the focused, almost analytical expression of someone running rapid calculations.
I sat back down.
I folded my hands on the table.
“The money never reached our account,” I said. “Dad canceled the internal transfer the same day I played him the recording.”
I paused.
“Also, this house is owned by his company. It always has been, which Daniel knew before we signed the lease agreement.”
I looked at Daniel steadily.
“You have ten minutes.”
He found his voice.
“Emily—”
“There’s one more page.”
I slid the final document across the table.
Richard’s report on the timeline.
The London overlap.
Thomas Hail.
The dates.
Daniel looked at it.
Then he looked at Rebecca.
Rebecca looked at it.