Chapter 9 - THE BRAKES
My car had been in the shop three months earlier.
Brake failure.
I remembered exactly how it happened.
I was driving home on a rainy Thursday when the pedal went soft beneath my foot.
I pumped it.
Nothing.
The light ahead turned red.
Traffic stopped.
I yanked the emergency brake and swerved onto the shoulder.
I missed a pickup truck by maybe three feet.
When I called Ryan, crying and shaking, he arrived twenty minutes later.
He hugged me.
Held my face.
Told me I was lucky.
Lucky.
The memory made me sick.
Detective Harris sent investigators to retrieve my vehicle repair records.
The mechanic had documented a damaged brake line.
At the time, he assumed road debris had caused it.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
“Can you prove Ryan did it?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
That became the phrase I hated most.
Not yet.
The evidence grew every day.
But proof moved slower than fear.
Ryan remained in custody after a judge revoked his bail.
His lawyer insisted everything had an innocent explanation.
The insurance policy?
Financial planning.
The photographs?
Vehicle maintenance.
The stolen identities?
Business records.
The secret accounts?
Tax strategy.
The fake divorce decree?
A misunderstanding.
Monica read the defense filing and threw it onto her desk.
“Apparently your husband is the unluckiest innocent man in America.”
“He’s not my husband.”
She looked at me.
“No. He isn’t.”
That hurt more than it should have.
The county confirmed what we already knew.
My marriage to Ryan was legally invalid because his marriage to Natalie remained active.
Five years of anniversaries.
Five years of filing taxes together.
Five years of being introduced as Mrs. Cole.
Legally, it had all been built on a lie.
I went home that afternoon and took off my wedding ring.
I held it for a long time.
Then I dropped it into a kitchen drawer.
I couldn’t throw it away yet.
That made me angry too.
Two days later, Detective Harris called us back to the station.
Megan was already there.
So was another woman.
She was maybe fifty-five, with short gray hair and a tired face.
“This is Emily Parker,” Harris said.
I stared.
The passport from the storage unit.
Emily looked at me.
“You’re Claire?”
“Yes.”
She swallowed.
“I think Ryan stole my identity.”
Emily had hired Ryan five years earlier to manage bookkeeping for her small business.
He had access to tax records, bank statements and payroll.
When she fired him after finding accounting errors, she thought that was the end of it.
It wasn’t.
He had opened two credit cards in her name.
A business loan.
And apparently obtained a passport using her information.
“Why?” I asked.
Harris answered.
“To create financial identities he could control.”
Megan whispered, “How many people did he do this to?”
“We don’t know.”
Then Harris slid a photograph across the table.
It showed Ryan at an airport.
The timestamp was from the previous year.
Beside him stood a woman none of us recognized.
Ryan was kissing her.
On the back of her suitcase was a luggage tag.
Her name was visible.
SOPHIA MARTIN.
Harris looked at us.
“We found her.”
“Another girlfriend?”
He shook his head.
“Worse.”
I almost laughed.
“What could possibly be worse?”
Harris placed a death certificate on the table.
Sophia Martin.
Age thirty-two.
Deceased eight months ago.
May you like
Cause of death:
Single-vehicle accident.
