“I don’t want your money, Sierra. I’m happy to help you with whatever you need.”
“If I pay you, that means you’re my attorney and you can’t say anything to anyone about what I’m about to tell you.”
That confused him. Didn’t she trust him? “Anything you say to me is between you and me. You don’t need to pay for my silence. You just have to ask.”
“You’re mad.”
A little bit. “I thought I made it clear what I wanted with you, and it’s not to be your lawyer.”
She deflated in the chair, her shoulders sagging and all the air going out of her lungs in a loud sigh. “So you won’t help me.”
“Of course I’ll help you. I just don’t get why you didn’t just ask me about this the half-dozen times you’ve seen me over the last week instead of making an appointment.”
Sierra stood and paced back and forth. “I didn’t want you to think I was taking advantage of our friendship.”
“I hope we are moving into a deeper kind of friendship where you trust me and know that I’d do anything for you.”
She stopped in her tracks and stared at him, looking for something, then deciding she saw whatever it was she needed to see to sit back down and tell him what she needed. “This is awkward. You and I . . . We’re seeing each other now. I don’t want to screw that up.”
“Hundreds of people have sat where you are ready to end relationships because they couldn’t trust the other person enough to have a civil conversation about what they needed and wanted from the other person. So, Sierra, what do you need from me?”
She sucked in a breath. “I need your help to find out if David was having an affair or in some kind of trouble that cost him, us, fifty thousand dollars.”
He thought she needed help navigating the insurance and red tape on her property up in Napa. He never thought this had anything to do with David.
No wonder she’d been apprehensive to bring it up to him.
Mason fell back in his seat and tried to get his thoughts together and figure out a way to navigate this. He started with the simple question. “Why do you think he was having an affair?”
Sierra pulled some papers out of one of the envelopes and slid them across the desk. “He took out a fifty-thousand-dollar loan nearly two years ago. For what, I have no idea. I didn’t know anything about it until after his death and the bank contacted me about delinquent payments I knew nothing about. He had the bills sent to his office, not the house. Once the bank contacted me, I went through the boxes his assistant had packed up and delivered to the house after his death.”
“Okay. He took out a loan you didn’t know about. Did he use it to pay off debts the two of you accrued during the marriage?”
“Of course I checked that first.” Annoyance replaced her earlier trepidation.
“I’m just trying to cover all the bases.” He didn’t want to dig into their marriage, but she’d come to him for help. This was a can of worms he hoped to avoid. “Did you receive any statements for an account you didn’t know about?”
“No. That’s what I need you to help me find out. If this money, or even part of it, is sitting in some other account that I can access, I need to find it. Then I can pay off the loan—or at least some of it with what’s left.” She raked her fingers through her hair, distress and despair in her eyes. “I have been struggling the last year to pay this and the other bills on my own.” Tears glistened in her eyes.
David had left her a mess and a mountain of bills.
“Didn’t he have life insurance?”
She rolled her eyes. “By the time I paid off the funeral costs and credit card debt we had, hoping to make the monthly expenses more reasonable on just my salary, I only had a small amount left to put into school accounts for the boys. My plan was to use part of the survivors’ benefits money from David’s Social Security to pay bills and transfer what’s left into their college funds. Then I got hit with this.” She tapped her finger on the loan notice. “The job you got me is a huge help. I make more, so I can afford to pay this, but it’s an expense and I have nothing to show for it.”
Mason suspected he knew where the money went, but he didn’t want to be right. “Did you find any evidence of an affair?”
“His phone is locked. His fingerprint is required to get into it. Because the phone he used was provided by his company, I don’t have the bills for it, so I can’t see who he called or texted.”
Smart, hiding his conversations and texts from his wife.
Bastard.
“I’m guessing you didn’t find any notes or unexplained receipts among his things.”
“No. I have no hard evidence that he was having an affair. It makes me sick to think that he hid something like this so well that I didn’t even notice. But I think about the two years leading up to his death and I think about how everything had become so stale and routine. As a family, everything seemed fine, but between David and me . . . We lost something along the way.”
“You suspect he pulled away because he had someone else.” Mason’s stomach knotted. The bastard didn’t see what he had right in front of him, a beautiful, kind, loving woman.
“I think we drifted so far apart that I didn’t see or suspect he was seeing someone else. Like I said, everything seemed fine between us. I knew we needed to spend more time together as a couple, but work and kids took over our lives. We didn’t have big, blow-up fights. He mentioned just as much as I did that we needed to get away, just the two of us, but we never did. I don’t know how to explain it, except that we were living our lives and it seemed both of us were thinking that as the boys got older we’d have more time for each other.
“I did feel like there were days and weeks where he was preoccupied with something he didn’t want to talk about. He went on more business trips the months leading up to his death. The night of the accident, he was driving down south to meet with clients the next day.”
Are you sure?
Mason had his doubts.
She answered his unspoken question. “At least, I think that’s where he was going. I was so lost in my grief and taking care of the boys right afterward, making sure they were okay, I never asked his boss about it. I just went through the motions each day, trying to get whatever needed to be done, done.”
Mason held his hand out to her across the desk. She laid her hand in his and he squeezed to let her know he was there. “You know none of this is your fault, right?”
“I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I just didn’t want to know.”
“A lot of my clients feel that exact same way. Women and men. They aren’t exactly happy in their marriages but there isn’t enough strife to end it. There’s still hope that they’ll find their way back to how they felt when they got together and married. They let things slide. They make excuses, like staying together for the kids. They don’t open up about how they’re feeling or what they want to change. Sometimes things just fizzle out and they end up here. Other times, someone finds what they need with someone else and they still end up here.”
“Is that why you never married?”