Then the screen flashed:
A six-digit authentication code has been sent to your mobile device.
I stared at the monitor with dead eyes.
I clicked Try another method.
The system cheerfully informed me that it was sending a backup text to the exact same stolen device.
My entire adult existence was cryptographically tied to a piece of hardware Greg was carrying.
Martin called again forty minutes later.
“I’ve mobilized Ellen Price. She’s bypassing internal IT to verify your identity and force a backdoor into your corporate communications.”
“Beautiful.”
“I also woke up Rachel Kim. You listed her as your legal proxy.”
Rachel was the attorney who had prepared my estate plan a decade earlier, just before I married Greg.
“Thank God twenty-eight-year-old Clare was obsessively neurotic.”
“Thirty-eight-year-old Clare is still neurotic,” Martin replied.
An hour later, thanks to Ellen’s digital sorcery, I accessed a temporary, restricted version of my inbox.
It was flooded with spam, out-of-office replies, and vendor newsletters.
But near the top, unread, was an automated alert from our joint banking institution.
I opened it.
LARGE TRANSFER NOTIFICATION. AMOUNT: $82,000.00. STATUS: CLEARED.
The transfer date was exactly three days before we boarded our flight to Thailand.
I stopped breathing.
The air in my lungs seemed to turn to stone.
I had not authorized an eighty-two-thousand-dollar withdrawal.
I grabbed the phone and called Martin.
“Something is critically wrong,” I gasped.
“Specify.”
“Eighty-two thousand dollars was siphoned from our joint savings three days before the trip.”
Silence stretched across the line.
“Did you authorize it?”
“No.”
“Do you know the destination account?”
“No.”
“Screenshot every pixel of that ledger,” Martin commanded.
But where does eighty-two thousand dollars disappear to in the middle of a marital war?
