The Smile Across the Yard: A Story of Betrayal and the Video That Changed Everything

Chapter 3 - The Name on the Transfer

Deb didn't even sit down.

She put the folded bank page on my kitchen counter, face down, and kept her hand on it like she was holding a lid on something that wanted out.

"Before you read this, I need you to remember I'm on your side," she said.

I remember the party was still going on outside.

I could hear the kids screaming around the sprinkler, and I could hear Nick's laugh cutting through all of it like he didn't have one thing in the world to worry about.

I looked at Deb's hand on that page and I already felt sick, and I hadn't read a word of it yet.

I pulled it toward me and turned it over.

It was a printout from our joint checking account.

Three years of transactions, and every month, like a heartbeat, a transfer went out to the same name.

Marsh.

Five hundred, then seven hundred, then a thousand.

Never once did Nick say a word to me about it.

"Who's E.

Marsh?"

I asked.

Deb shook her head.

"I don't know.

I grabbed it out of his truck last week when I was looking for Ellie's sippy cup.

I've been sitting on it for eleven days because I didn't want to be the one who put this in your lap."

Marsh.

I knew that name.

I knew it the way you know a smell from a room you haven't walked into in years.

I walked down the hall to the storage closet, and I found the folder where I keep everything from Nick's mother's estate, because I'm the one who handled every piece of paper when she died.

I pulled out the will and I sat on the floor of that closet and I read it again, all the way through, for the first time in four years.

There it is.

On the second page, in the attorney's clean little print, right under Nick's name.

"To my sister's daughter, Ellen Marsh, of Franklin County, in trust."

I sat there on the carpet and I said the name out loud twice, Ellen Marsh, like I was trying to teach it to myself, because in eleven years of marriage Nick had never once said it to me.

He had a cousin.

A living cousin.

A cousin with a claim on that family's money, and a cousin getting paid out of our account every month, and I found out about her on the same Saturday I was cutting a cake shaped like a ladybug for my daughter's second birthday.

I folded the will back into the folder, and I stood up, and I fixed my face, because I could hear Ellie's voice outside calling for me.

That's the part I want to be honest about.

I fixed my face.

I walked back out to that party with a smile on it and I refilled the chip bowls and I sang the song and I clapped when she blew out the candle, and the whole time I was counting the people on that lawn.

Forty-some guests.

Neighbors, Nick's guys from the dealership, Deb's kids, my mother.

And the woman in the tan top.

She was standing by the drink table, and Nick was standing close to her, close the way people stand when they've known each other a long time and don't want anyone to notice it.

She was holding a paper gift bag with a gold ribbon on it.

A plain white bag with a gold ribbon, and I had never seen it leave my house, never seen it come in, never handed it to anyone or picked it up off a table.

Then my brother-in-law Ty came up beside me with a paper plate in his hand and his voice down low.

"Hey, Karen," he said.

"Who's the blonde?"

"Friend of Nick's, I think," I said.

"From work."

Ty chewed and looked at her over the rim of his plate.

"That's weird," he said.

"Why's that?"

"Because you gave me the invitation list."

He said it easy, the way he says everything.

"I was doing headcount for the catering.

I know exactly who's supposed to be here.