I'm Still In Love With the Groom novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Every Quarter

He was sitting on a flat rock by the creek when I came down at dawn, with the folder on his knee and his hands hanging empty between them.

The water had dropped overnight, and the truck was still parked where Ray's chain had left it, mud to the door handles.

I sat down on the next rock and did not say good morning.

"Kat told me about the wedding," I said.

"I figured."

"She told me one other thing."

He nodded and looked at the water.

"I'll start where it started," he said. "September 2020. I was twenty-five and I'd been analyzing client statements at my father's firm for two years. One afternoon a statement didn't reconcile, so I opened a second set of books he kept in a locked cabinet."

"Two sets."

"One for the clients, and one for what was actually in the accounts." His mouth twisted. "There was almost nothing in the accounts."

I closed my eyes.

I knew what that looked like.

I had seen it in dozens of other men's ledgers, and in dozens of other families gutted.

I had never once seen it with my own name on the wedding invitation.

"I photographed every page," Ryan said. "I called the FBI tip line from a gas station. By that evening I was in a hotel room with two agents and a pot of bad coffee."

"That was the nineteenth."

"The nineteenth. They told me the raid would come in three days, and that if one person in my father's circle got a warning, the money would move, and they'd lose it all."

"My parents' money was already gone."

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