Chapter 4 - The Anatomy of an Alibi
"You spied on me," Preston hissed, his voice dropping into a register that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It wasn't the voice of a polished professional anymore. It was the raw, vicious tone of a bully whose playground racket had been dismantled in front of the whole school. "You're a guest in my home! You sleep under my roof, you eat my groceries, and you hack into my personal electronics like a common thief!"
"This isn't your roof, Preston," Ellie spoke.
The sound of her voice cut through the room like a cold draft through an open cellar door.
She hadn't moved from the head of the table. Her eyes weren't looking at me, and they weren't looking at the broken dessert. She was staring at Preston, her gaze fixed entirely on the gold wedding band around his finger.
"What did you say?" Preston turned on her, trying to summon that towering, dismissive authority he had used to cow her for the last five years.
"I said, this isn't your roof," Ellie repeated, her voice gathering strength with every syllable. "The down payment on this house came from my mother’s life insurance policy. Every single nickel of the sixty-thousand-dollar deposit came from Warren and Martha Davis. You didn't have the credit score to buy a used sedan when I married you."
"Ellie, don't be hysterical—"
"Don't call me hysterical!" she erupted. It was the first time I had heard my daughter scream since she was twelve years old, and the sheer force of it made Preston take an involuntary step backward. "You knocked my mother's dish onto the floor! That was the serving plate she brought home from Savannah when we were kids! You looked at my father—a man who worked two jobs so I could graduate debt-free—and you told him to lick his food off the floor!"
"It was an accident! I lost my balance—"
"You didn't lose your balance," I said softly, stepping between Preston and my daughter. "You wanted to remind me that you owned her. You wanted to show those rich folks that you were the master of this estate and that anything connected to Ellie’s past was garbage you could sweep away."
Preston laughed bitterly, running both hands through his hair. "Oh, brilliant. The great patriarch speaks. You really think you’re smart, don't you, Warren? You think a couple of hotel receipts prove an affair? It was a business meeting! Vanessa and I were working on the Halloway presentation in privacy so their board wouldn't leak the numbers!"
"Is that why there's a jewelry charge from Tiffany's on the twelfth?" Ellie asked, her voice dangerously calm now.
Preston stopped cold.
"I check the joint statements, Preston," Ellie said, walking slowly toward him. "You thought I didn't. You told me finance was 'boring' and that you'd handle the portfolio so I could focus on my interior design projects. But last month, five thousand four hundred dollars went to the Tiffany boutique on South Boulevard. I didn't get a necklace for my birthday. I didn't get an anniversary ring."
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She stood three inches from his chest. She was smaller than him by half a foot, but in that moment, Preston looked like a paper cutout against a raging fire.
"Who got the necklace, Preston?" she asked.
