POV: Hunter
The safe house was a quiet, furnished apartment Riley had access to. It smelled of lemon cleaner and dust. Tessa was in the shower, the water running. Hunter stood in the small living room, his personal laptop open on the kitchen table. It was the one thing he'd grabbed from his wrecked office before the police sealed the house. His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
You don't want to know. Just walk away. Trust her.
But the map was in her handwriting. The "M" was her mother. Trust was a luxury that got you killed. He had to know how deep the lie went.
He opened their shared financial software. He and Tessa had one password for bills, a system for transparency. Or so he thought. He logged in. The dashboard showed their checking, savings, and joint credit card. Everything looked normal. Too normal.
His eyes, trained to spot anomalies in terrain and intel reports, scanned the transaction lists. Groceries, utilities, mortgage. Then he saw it. A pattern. Every month, on the 15th, a transfer out: $2,000. It was labeled "Transfer to Savings." But their actual savings account hadn't grown by $2,000 a month. Not even close.
She's re-labeled it. A cold trickle of dread started in his chest. He navigated to the actual transfer history. He clicked on one of the "Transfer to Savings" entries. The details popped up.
Destination: MSH Holdings LLC. Account Ending in 4481.
MSH. Morgan Sophia Henderson.
The room felt suddenly airless. $2,000. Every single month. For how long? He clicked back, month by month. The transfers went back fourteen months. Twenty-eight thousand dollars. His money. Their money. Sent to her mother's company.
But why a company? Why not just send it to her personal account? To hide it. To make it look like a business expense.
He kept digging. He found two more, larger transfers from three and five months ago. $10,000 each. Labeled "Home Repair."
Forty-eight thousand dollars.
Almost fifty thousand dollars, gone. While he was overseas, thinking his wife was home building their future, she was draining it to pour into the bottomless pit of her mother's troubles.
The shower stopped. He quickly closed the windows, cleared the history, and opened a news site. His heart was hammering against his ribs. The numbers flashed behind his eyes. 48,000. It wasn't just about the money. It was about the lie. A sustained, calculated lie that lasted over a year.
Tessa came out in a towel, her hair wet. "Couldn't sleep?" she asked, offering a small, fragile smile.
"Just checking the news," he said, his voice sounding strangely normal to his own ears. "Seeing if there's anything about… us."
Her smile vanished. She wrapped her arms around herself. "Do you think we'll ever be able to go home?"
Home is gone, he thought. You sold it, piece by piece, for two thousand dollars a month. "I don't know," he said.
He watched her walk to the bedroom to get dressed. The woman he loved was a stranger. And she was hiding more than just money. She was hiding the reason their life had just exploded.
The laptop felt like it was burning a hole in the table. He had found the first secret. And it led directly to a second, more terrifying one.
Where did the rest of the money go?
Hunter has discovered Tessa secretly transferred $48,000 to her mother, revealing a massive, ongoing lie and making him question what else she's hidden.