Christopher’s lawyer tried the things Okafor had predicted. A novel. Concern for my mental health. A misunderstanding.
None of it survived contact with the recording.
He was convicted of attempted murder, insurance fraud, and forgery.
The number of years is very large.
I sat in that courtroom — three hundred years of these stories have a courtroom, and I finally understand why, because a courtroom is where the truth is finally said out loud and written down and made real — and I watched my husband be led away, and he turned once, and looked at me, and I saw him searching my face for the frightened, useful wife he’d married.
She wasn’t there anymore.
She’d turned off a breaker at 2:13 in the morning and never come back.
PART 5 — FINAL
The insurance companies, once the fraud was exposed, voided every policy.
The twenty-four million dollars my husband tried to trade my life for evaporated the moment his intent was proven, which is a poetry I find deeply satisfying: he destroyed himself, and his family, and fourteen years, for a number that was never real, that could only ever have existed if he’d succeeded, and that vanished the instant he failed.
