Panic flared. “You can’t just take my property.”
Arthur answered from behind me. “We can, in the course of preserving evidence related to financial fraud and assault.”
She stared between us. “I didn’t steal anything.”
“Then you have very little to fear from documentation,” Arthur said.
Her gaze dropped to the phone. I watched her remember, in stages, the apartment, the gifts, the transfers, the stories Mark had told her about private accounts and complicated executive structures and why discretion mattered. I saw calculation, then dread, then a terrible thin hope that perhaps honesty might still buy her something.
“He said it was his money,” she whispered.
“That was either a lie or a confession,” I said. “Possibly both.”
Tears finally broke loose. Not graceful tears. Angry ones. “You think I’m stupid.”
I considered her. “I think you are very young. I think you made greedy choices. I think you liked the attention and the access. I also think he selected you because he believed those things made you manageable.”
She actually looked startled by that. People rarely expect nuance from the woman whose marriage they helped destroy.
“I’m not interested in ruining you to make myself feel righteous,” I went on. “That would be a waste of both our time. But if you accept money wired out of a hospital procurement fund, and then you walk into my lobby wearing our badge while publicly humiliating employees, and then you throw hot coffee at me, you have introduced yourself into a situation larger than your live stream.”
Her lips trembled. “What happens now?”
“That depends in part on whether you decide, for once today, to tell the truth.”
She looked at the phone again, then reached for it with shaking fingers. She ended the stream. The silence that followed its disappearance felt almost sacred.
Arthur extended a hand. She gave him the phone.
“Good,” I said. “Now stand up.”
She did, unsteadily.
One of the volunteers near the gift shop began clapping.
