He Let Our Daughter Die for Twenty-Three Dollars novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Recipe Tin

It was past midnight when we got back to the green door.

The woman from room four met us in the hall with my daughter asleep on her shoulder.

"She ate at ten and slept at eleven," she said. "Not one peep."

She looked at Colter's lip and went to get ice without being asked.

I took my daughter and carried her up to the bassinet.

When I came down, Colter was at the kitchen table with the ice pressed to his mouth and the folder open in front of him.

I sat across from him.

My hands were still not steady.

"Tell me about the emails," he said. "All of it. Slowly."

"There's nothing to tell. I never saw them until Sheldon printed them out."

"Who sent them?"

"I did. According to them." I rubbed my eyes. "They were from my own account, written in my voice. They told the Fund's treasurer to move the money into a company, and they used my nickname for Dennis."

"What nickname?"

"Coach. Only I ever called him that."

Colter wrote *Coach* in the margin of the folder.

"Subject lines. Signatures."

"Everything. Even the little smiley face I always put at the end."

"That's a lot of detail for a stranger."

"It wasn't a stranger," I said. "That's what I've been saying for two years."

"Then I'll ask the question I should have asked on Wednesday."

He put the ice down.

"Who knew your passwords?"

"Nobody."

"Annabel."

"Nobody. I don't tell people my passwords."

"Not Sheldon? Not a friend? Not Brooke?"

"I'd never." I shook my head. "I forget things. I always have. When I was sixteen, I locked myself out of every account I had, and Carol said she'd keep them for me so it would never happen again."

I stopped.

Colter didn't move.

"She wrote them on an index card," I said slowly. "She kept it in her recipe tin, in the kitchen. Behind the lemon cake. Every Christmas she'd ask me for the new ones, and I'd tell her, and she'd copy them in."

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