I sat back, breathing hard. The development was dead if this report got out. But Martin had quashed it, hidden it. He’d commissioned a second, newer report—the one he’d shown me had downplayed any potential problems. If the shire council had seen this, or the prospective buyers had known, those presales would have dried up completely. We could be legally liable. This was fraud. I lurched to my feet, paced, then dragged my hands over my hair. What was Martin doing? Was he going to get on a plane and run? Leave me holding the bag? Had he ever intended actually going through with constructing this project? Or had it just been a way to fleece buyers out of deposits—the proverbial swampland-in-Florida scam?
No. That couldn’t be.
I sat myself at his desk and powered up his desktop. His computer was password protected, but I’d watched carefully when he’d shown me what now appeared to be fake spreadsheets. The monitor flared to life and I typed in the password I remembered seeing him use. It failed. Because I was nervous. I’d missed uppercasing a letter. I tried again.
The system booted up.
My heart thudded as I accessed our online banking accounts—Martin had the sites bookmarked, and his computer remembered the access code. A security question came up.
“What town were you married in?”
I typed “Las Vegas.”
It denied access.
I typed “Vegas.”
It failed.
My hands hovered over the keyboard. I had one more attempt. If I failed again the site might lock me out. I frowned. Then opted to ask for another question instead.
“Where was your father born?”
I typed “Melbourne.”
The banking accounts opened. Sweat pearled and dribbled down my stomach. The fan ruffled my hair. I could not believe what I was seeing. Our Agnes Holdings account contained a total balance of five thousand dollars and eighty-five cents. My temperature rose. I began to shake. The last time he’d shown me, it had registered over thirty million in short-term investments, and a good portion of that had come from presales deposits.
I clicked on Recent Transactions.
I stared, aghast. Since the day he’d shown me the bank balance, he’d been siphoning off funds in chunks at regular intervals. I clicked on the details of those transactions. The monies had been transferred to a numbered account offshore. I was unable to access that account.
I sat back. My head spun. I’d been lured into a web and sucked dry. More than thirty million gone. I’d been cleaned out. Willow’s words flooded into my brain.
“We want to believe what a con artist tells us, Ellie. They manipulate our reality. And if this is truly what you think it is, a long con, the kind that takes weeks, months, or even years to unfold, it requires manipulation of reality at a far higher level, and it plays with our most basic core beliefs about ourselves.”
The memory of Dana’s warning sliced through me. I cast my mind back to the orange Subaru parked outside my apartment in Vancouver. The same model and color in the underground parking garage. The “doppelgänger.” Who had kissed a woman with long, wavy auburn hair whose face I couldn’t see.
I felt dizzy. I was going to throw up.
I cast my memory back further, to that winter’s night ten months ago when I’d literally tripped into Martin’s arms at my father’s hotel.
Drunk. Vulnerable.
I’d been so loud in arguing with my father. I’d felt people all around our table listening. Someone could easily—likely—have heard my father offering me capital for a project, any project I wanted. Could Martin himself have been seated behind us and overheard? Or had someone at the bar eavesdropped on me telling Dana how much money my father would give me? An image struck me—The Rock making a call on his phone, his dark eyes fixed on me. I felt sick. Someone in that bar could have arranged for me to fall into a trap later that evening. Could Martin have been waiting, like a spider, with a fine web of false narratives with which to trap my heart?
I swallowed as Martin’s impassioned words crawled up from the depths of my soul.
“When we step into a magic show, we arrive actively wanting to be fooled. Magic is . . . It’s a kind of willing con. You’re not being foolish to fall for it. If you don’t fall for it, the magician is doing something wrong.”
He really had conned me. He’d baited, hooked, and played me over months—taking me to Europe on a wild whirlwind trip. Paying for everything. Then vanishing for weeks at a time and suddenly reappearing. He’d tricked me into giving him everything, including my hand in marriage.
And I’d been eager for it. I’d wanted what he’d offered. I felt sick. I glanced at the life insurance policy attached to the mortgage. And a darker thought struck like a hatchet. Could he kill me?
Something sounded in the living room.
I stilled. Listened. I heard it again—footfalls on tiles.
Martin.
I scrabbled to gather up the papers on the desk, cramming them back into folders and envelopes. Pieces wafted to the floor. I bundled the files into my arms and lunged for the filing cabinet. A shadow darkened the doorway.
I froze.
“Ellie?”
I spun around.
THEN
ELLIE
Willow.
She stood in the doorway, her gaze flicking over the mess, the papers and folders in my arms.
“What on earth are you doing?” she asked.
I couldn’t speak for a moment. I’d thought she was Martin. I hurriedly finished replacing the papers and files and locked
