What I found was a bank statement.
Not ours. A company account — Marlowe Holdings, vendor payments, the account I have signatory authority over because I own the company my grandmother started in 1971 and my father ran until he died in 2021.
Forty-one commercial properties. Four hundred and something tenants. Nineteen staff.
And one line, on the eleventh of every month, going back to the August of 2020.
***COBB CONSULTING — 2,900.00***
Sixty-three payments. A hundred and eighty-two thousand, seven hundred.
Cobb.
Her name is Verity Cobb.
I printed it on our own printer at about four in the morning, in my dressing gown, and I sat on the floor of that spare room with it in my hand and I thought: he has been paying her since before he met me.
And at ten past five I packed a bag, put my ring on the statement, and drove to my mother's.
And the four days in between, which nobody ever asks about and which were the worst of it.
