Page 71 of Wreckage and Rain

Three hundred and forty thousand dollars a year.

The number does what the email couldn't. Because I know what an account executive costs. I have signed those offers myself. Nobody pays that for the job she was doing, and the part of my brain that prices things has already finished the math before the rest of me is ready for the answer.

The price tag. What my father decided his son's happiness was worth.

"The strategy was phased," Dom says. "Phase one, integration. Make herself indispensable. Phase two, isolation. Reduce Summer's presence. Take over event duties. Monopolize your time. Phase three, escalation."

"You're reading intent backward out of a result." I hear myself doing it. I can't stop. It's the voice I use across a table when the other side's number is wrong. "She was ambitious. Ambitious people make themselves indispensable. That's not a phase. That's a personality."

"Colt."

"Show me where anybody wrote phase one."

He doesn't argue with me. He turns pages around and slides them across the counter, one at a time, until there's a row of them facing me and I've stopped talking.

Calendar entries. Deleted. Summer's birthday. Family dinners. Appointments she asked me to come to.

"I blocked that date," I say. "I know I blocked that date."

"You did. It's in the audit log. So is who removed it." He waits. "You want me to say the name, or do you want to read it yourself."

My life lives and dies by my calendar. I thought I forgot. I built a whole opinion of myself out of that, and it was a lie somebody typed.

I was a shitty husband. I was also being managed. My attention directed. My reality filtered through a woman whose full-time job was erasing my wife from my life while she made herself the only thing left in it.

"Now the night," Dom says.

"The celebration."

"Before the celebration." He waits until I look at him. "Cheyenne bought Rohypnol from a contact in Atlanta six weeks before the close. The PI traced it through Venmo transactions she was too arrogant to delete."

Six weeks before. Not that night. Six weeks before the night.

"No," I say.

"A bartender at The Butcher Block confirmed she ordered your drinks four separate evenings in that window. The night Summer walked in on the two of you was one of them. Cheyenne tipped him a hundred each time to bring the bourbons straight to you. He thought it was a kink thing. He didn't ask. The PI got him to talk."

"No. I was tired that whole month. I was closing Tidewater, I was running on four hours, I was..."

And I stop. Because I can hear it.

The wine that tasted heavier than wine tastes. The cotton in my head. Me telling Summer I was just tired. Me telling Summer I was just tired, while I sat across from the woman who did it, andSummer walked in on that, and I let her leave that restaurant thinking she'd seen what she'd seen.

"Say it," Dom says. Not cruel. He just isn't going to do it for me.

"She was testing the dosage on me."

"She was testing the dosage on you. Four dinners over six weeks. We have the receipts. She was learning how your body metabolizes it so that on the night she could time it precisely."

The room tilts. I grip the counter so hard the marble bites into my palms.

"At the celebration she ordered your bourbon and tipped the bartender to deliver them. We have his affidavit. After the second drink you were dosed. By the third you weren't capable of consenting to anything."

Dom flips to security stills. He spreads them out on the counter.

I look. I don't want to look but I do anyway. I feel sick to my stomach and violated so completely I don't know what was real at this point and what was a manipulation.

"Bar exit at the same time the IG photos posted to the firm's account. Cheyenne supporting you to the curb. Sidewalk camera at the corner of Meeting and Market captures you stumbling and her catching you. The limo company's interior camera was conveniently disabled that night. The driver's statement says Cheyenne instructed him to go to the Belmond Charleston Place, not to your home. She had a room reserved under the firm's corporate account. She booked the room at 4:30 PM that afternoon. Before you got in the car."