that was real. It hadn’t happened yet, but strangely enough, here I felt support for those dreams from people who barely knew me, far more than those I had been around most of my life.
Nina: Sorry, classes start next week. I’m trying to sort out a place to live before then.
Caitlyn: You are awake! I thought you were coming back soon. Silly me!
She thought I was coming back? Why? I set my phone on the nightstand and pulled the blankets back over me, waiting for Matthew to return.
A few minutes later, my phone buzzed again. I scowled at it. It wasn’t like Caitlyn not to take a hint.
But it wasn’t Caitlyn. It was my husband.
Calvin: What in the hell were you doing in Newton today?
Immediately, I froze. How did he know about that? Calvin knew I was planning to go back to school, but I hadn’t said a word about moving back into the house I’d purchased years ago. There was no way he would have known I was there.
Unless…the man at the door had told him. Or he was having me followed.
And if the latter was true, he may have also known that Matthew was with me too.
But my heart iced over completely as something else occurred to me.
The foreign accents. The sleeping bags on the floor.
Calvin had lied all those years ago, and now he was using my sweet, small house as a stopover for smuggling people into the country illegally. The stacks of documents and passports I’d seen in his office that day reappeared in my mind’s eye. He had continued that business. He had built his own meager fortune on these illegalities. And what’s more, he was still doing it, attached to my name, despite everything he had promised.
At that moment, Matthew walked back into the room with three frown lines that looked permanently etched over his brow.
“All right,” he said. “If you tell me you don’t know anything more about these people or that house…I believe you.”
He was shaking his head with the look of a man still figuring things out. But then, all of a sudden, his expression cleared.
“I believe you,” he said again. “And I love you. Enough that you and I are more important than this case. Nina, I think it’s time I stepped back and—”
“I do know who they are,” I cut in before he could finish.
He blinked, stunned, then sat heavily on the bed again to face me. “You do?”
“I—” I shrugged. “I have an idea.”
He frowned. “Wait. You do know who Károly Kertész is or you don’t? Katarina Csaszar?”
“I’m guessing they’re illegal immigrants,” I said. “Smuggled in by my husband through one of those houses in Brooklyn. Or any number of properties he has around the tristate area that are likely owned by that company, Pantheon.”
Matthew’s jaw dropped.
“I have to tell you something else,” I said softly.
And then I proceeded to tell him everything I knew. I told him about the money I’d given Calvin out of my trust when I was young. The additional cash he’d requested, again and again, from my grandmother’s accounts. I told him about finding the cache of dirty documents and how many of them had my forged signature, along with the deeds and other property-based paperwork.
I didn’t mention the beating. I didn’t mention the fear. After all, he knew how terrified I’d been of my own family over the past ten years. I hoped that would be enough for him now to understand my motives.
He was quiet for a long time after I finished. I hugged my arms around my chest, waiting to hear him tell me it was over. That I wasn’t the woman he thought I was. That I deserved to be locked up with my husband and every other criminal in New York.
After all, he would have been right.
Instead, his response was the last one I expected.
“That’s it?”
I looked up in shock. “What do you mean, ‘that’s it’? I just told you I’m complicit in an illegal immigration scheme Calvin has been running for years. That’s very, very bad, Matthew.”
“It’s bad,” he agreed slowly. “But…Nina, you gave him some money and kept his secrets because he trapped you into this. And I don’t for a fucking minute believe it was just to keep your daughter’s home life intact. Not when you send her away for months at a time.”
“Andover is a very good—”
“You love Olivia,” Matthew interrupted me. “If I hadn’t known it before, I definitely do now, after seeing