PART 2 — THE QUESTION IN THE MEETING
I am Rhea Oberlin and I was the controller at Thackery Row Holdings for five years.
Not the bookkeeper. The controller. I ran the ledger, the reconciliations, the reporting, and the client accounts, and I was good at it and Adelaide Thackery hired me herself in 2019 because I was good at it.
Thackery Row is a residential property management company. Four hundred and eleven units across Hadley Vale.
If you manage rentals, you hold other people’s money. Security deposits, prepaid rent, reserves. In this state that money goes into a client trust account and it is not the company’s money and it never becomes the company’s money, and there are rules about it that are not complicated and not optional.
I met Caspian at a work thing in 2020. We married in 2021. I kept my job and I kept my name and both of those were, at the time, treated as slightly eccentric.
In the January of last year, in a Tuesday management meeting, I asked a question.
Not an accusation. A question, out loud, in front of six people, about why the trust account reconciliation had been signed off by Adelaide in December when it had historically been signed by me, and why the closing balance was about four hundred thousand dollars lower than the deposit liability I was carrying.
Adelaide said there had been a timing difference on a transfer and that she would get me the detail.
Three weeks later I was moved.
Not demoted. Moved, in the warmest possible way, to a newly created role on the marketing and leasing side, because — Adelaide said, in her office, with tea — I was wasted in the back office and had a way with people.
I was flattered for about four months.
Marisol Quade started as controller in the April.
She was twenty-seven and she had two years of experience and she had been recommended, Adelaide said, by a friend.
I want to set down that Marisol Quade was not a woman who stole a husband. That is the story this town wants and it is not the story.
She was hired into a chair I had been moved out of, and she was hired because she would sign what she was given, and the affair started in the October and I now believe it was the second thing, not the first.
I found out about the affair in the June, when I was four months pregnant, from a photograph on a phone left on a kitchen counter.
And I did not say a word.
That is the six months. That is what everybody means when they say I had been preparing.
I did not confront my husband when I was four months pregnant with twins, in a house I did not own, employed by his mother.
I went quiet and I started reading.
