PART 2
I spent that entire morning doing exactly what Talia instructed, sitting cross-legged on the hotel bed with my laptop balanced on a pillow, downloading every transaction from the past year while my mother watched from the other bed, an ice pack pressed carefully against her swollen cheek.
The pattern, once I started actually looking at it chronologically instead of glancing at a balance every few months and trusting Roderick’s reassurance that “the savings were building nicely,” revealed itself with sickening clarity. Over the past fourteen months, a series of transfers — some as small as two thousand dollars, others as large as twelve — had moved out of our joint account into an account I didn’t recognize, always timed within a day or two of a larger deposit landing, as though someone had been specifically calibrating the withdrawals to avoid drawing my attention during the months I still checked the balance occasionally.
“There’s a pattern,” I told Talia when she called back that afternoon. “Small transfers, mostly under five thousand, moving out every few weeks for over a year. All going to the same account number.”
“Do you recognize the account?”
“No. It’s not one of ours.”
Talia was quiet for a moment. “I want you to think back. Fourteen months ago — does anything come to mind? A conversation, a change in his behavior, anything that might explain why this specific timeline started then?”
I thought about it carefully, working backward through the past year. Fourteen months ago was around the time Roderick had started taking on more “consulting projects” on weekends, explaining the extra hours as an opportunity to build savings faster for the house we’d talked about eventually buying. I’d been proud of him for the initiative. I’d never once asked to see where the consulting income was actually landing.
“He told me he’d picked up freelance consulting work,” I said slowly. “Around the same time. I thought it was extra income coming in. I never considered it might have been the explanation for money going out.”
PART 3
Talia recommended a forensic accountant, a precise, unflappable woman named Odalys Ferreira, who specialized in exactly this kind of financial reconstruction. Within a week, Odalys had traced the unfamiliar account back to its actual owner: a woman named Priya Chandrasekaran, listed as co-owner alongside Roderick himself, an account opened fourteen months earlier at a different bank than the one we’d always used together.
“I need you to prepare yourself,” Talia told me, the day the report came back. “This isn’t simply a hidden savings account. Odalys found lease documents for an apartment, also co-signed by both names, dated around the same window. And a joint membership at a resort property two hours outside the city.”
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