I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. Tanner had never answered like that before. Never. If anything, he liked sounding competent. In charge. But now his voice had gone tight, and there was something else there too.
Fear.
“What do you mean it’s not a good time?” I asked.
He let out a breath. “I’m moving things around. Just give me a bit.”
“How much time?”
“Clara, don’t start.”
That made my stomach drop.
I sat there long after the call ended, staring at my desk but not seeing anything. His words kept echoing in my head because they made no sense. My mother needed help. We both worked. We had no children, no huge mortgage, and no obvious financial disaster hanging over us. So why was he nervous?
That was strange.
By the time I got home, my chest felt tight with a kind of dread I could not explain. Tanner was there, pacing around the kitchen, grabbing his keys.
“I have to head out.”
“Now?”
“Yeah. Work thing.”
He kissed my forehead, but it felt rushed. His eyes did not really meet mine.
The second the front door shut behind him, the silence in the apartment turned sharp.
I stood still for a moment, trying to talk myself out of what I was thinking. Maybe there was a debt. Maybe he had messed something up and was too ashamed to admit it. Or maybe there was a tax issue or a missed payment. I wanted it to be something fixable. Something ordinary.
Then I opened his laptop.
The password was the same — my birthday.
I expected to see bills. Maybe debts.
But instead, I found dozens of regular transfers to the same woman. And below that, rent payments for an apartment in another part of the city. The dates matched perfectly with his “business trips.”
My hands turned cold.
At first, I just stared, unable to make sense of what I was seeing. Then I grabbed a pen from the counter and wrote down the address on the back of an old receipt. I do not remember taking my coat or locking the door. I only remember the sound of my own breathing in the car, shallow and uneven.
An hour later, I was standing at that door.
My heart hammered so hard it hurt.
