Chapter 3: The Policy text
By morning the bridal suite was an evidence grid and our marriage was a case file.
Detectives took my statement twice. They took Alex’s. They confirmed Nathan’s phone call through tower data that placed him in the suite at the time I described. The number on the other end of the call traced to a disposable line. The camera’s memory held hours of empty room and then Nathan’s arrival, the call, the exit—time-stamped proof that matched my dust-stained account.
May you like
In Nathan’s discarded jacket, found near the service gate, investigators located a folded set of papers: a life-insurance application naming me as primary beneficiary on a policy Alex had never signed, with signature work that a document examiner would later call skilled and false. The motive wrote itself in corporate language. Morgan Technologies sat at a valuation that made a widow’s shares and a best friend’s proximity into a pathway, if the widow could be made to look guilty of the heart attack that was not a heart attack.
Alex sat in a borrowed office chair in the estate library and stared at his hands. “He stood next to me at the altar,” he said. I had no comfort that could redesign a decade of friendship. I only had the fact that I had been under the bed when the plan was spoken aloud.
