Chapter 16: March

We sat around the kitchen table at one in the morning with Kendall's laptop open between us.

Hayes had put on his father's old sweater over nothing else, and I tried not to look at his forearms.

Kendall typed the login from the photo.

The screen thought for a moment.

Then it opened.

"Oh my God," Kendall said.

There were folders, hundreds of them, each named with a surname and a year.

I scrolled.

I saw the husband of the charity-ball chair.

I saw a judge's name, and a bank president's, and the pastor of a church in Darien.

"She wasn't just collecting," I said. "She was running a business."

"Is my name in there?" Kendall asked.

"There's a folder called Prentiss."

She put her hand over her mouth.

I opened it.

It held six video files, all dated this fall, and a text document at the bottom.

The document said: "Keep until the wedding. Release if the Sayre girl balks."

I did not say anything.

I could not.

Hayes reached over, closed the folder and went down the list to the last one.

It was named only "March."

It was one file, a little over a gigabyte.

His hand stopped on the trackpad.

"Download it," he said.

"All of them," I said. "We take the index, too."

"We don't have time for all of them."

"Then the index and this."

Kendall's fingers flew.

The index copied in a minute.

The bar for the March file crept along: ten percent, twenty, thirty.

Upstairs, a floorboard creaked.

All three of us looked at the ceiling.

The laptop gave a small chime, and a message slid across the corner of the screen.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Fiancé Butt-Dialed Me Mid-Affair, So I Married His Brother from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.