Penelope didn’t have a mark on her because Penelope was never in danger. She’d handed them Clara instead of herself.
My wife had spent eleven months being slowly framed by my own family, and then physically brutalized to seal the lie, while I was thousands of miles away, sending home the pay they intended to steal in her name.
I closed the notebook.
And then I did what I do. I’m a captain. I don’t react in the moment. I assess, I gather, and then I act with overwhelming, prepared force.
I took out my phone, and I started checking the promissory notes.
PART 3
Here’s what Penelope and my mother forgot about me.
I don’t take anyone’s word for anything, including my family’s. And I had access to things they didn’t think about.
The promissory notes with Clara’s forged signature — I photographed every one Penelope had left lying around in her arrogance. And I compared them to Clara’s actual signature, which I have on a hundred documents: our marriage license, our lease, the power of attorney we’d filed before my deployment.
They didn’t match. Of course they didn’t. Penelope had forged them, and she’d forged them badly, because she’d never expected anyone to actually check — she’d counted on Clara being too beaten-down to fight and me being too far away to look.
