PART 3 — WHAT I FOUND, AND WHAT I DIDN’T DO
I still had access. That is the single most important fact in this entire business and it is the least dramatic.
When they moved me to marketing nobody removed my read permissions on the accounting system, because removing permissions is an IT ticket and nobody raised one, and for fourteen months I could see everything I had always been able to see.
I did not touch a single thing. I want that stated plainly because the first question Beatrix Nwankwo asked me was whether I had ever made an entry, and the answer is no, not once, and that is why none of this ever became about me.
Over eleven weeks, in the evenings, I read four years of the client trust account.
The pattern is boring and it is the same pattern every time.
Transfers out of the trust account into the operating account, described as management fee true-ups, in amounts that were not management fees. Then transfers back in, weeks later, in round numbers, from wherever they had come from that month.
It is called lapping and it is the oldest thing in the world and it works until the day somebody wants their deposit back at the same time as somebody else.
At the point I stopped counting, the trust account was one million four hundred and eleven thousand dollars short of the deposit liability the company was carrying.
Four hundred and eleven units of tenants’ money.
Both signatories on that account are Caspian Thackery and Adelaide Thackery.
I went to Beatrix Nwankwo in the July at six months pregnant, and she brought in a forensic accountant called Mira Kazan, and the two of them spent nine weeks turning eleven weeks of my reading into something that would survive being looked at.
And then Beatrix told me to do nothing.
That is the part that mattered and it is the hardest thing anybody has ever asked me to do.
She said: you are six months pregnant, you live in a house owned by his family, you are employed by his mother, and you have no income of your own. If you file anything now, you will be out of that house inside a week, and they will spend the next two years telling a court that you are unstable and vindictive, and you will be fighting a custody case from a rented room.
She said: have your babies.
So I had my babies.
I want to describe those six months properly, because “she prepared” sounds like competence and most of it was not.
I lived in that house. Caspian was there four nights a week and at Marisol’s the other three, and the cover story was a project in the north of the county, and I had known since the June and I said nothing.
I ate dinner across a table from that man about a hundred and forty times knowing exactly where he had been.
I sat on a sofa with his mother in the October choosing a paint colour for a nursery in a house I already knew we would not be living in.
There was a baby shower in the November. Thirty-one women. Adelaide gave a speech about welcoming me into the family properly at last, and everybody said how lovely, and I have the photographs and my face in them is completely normal.
Beatrix asked me at one point whether I could keep it up.
I said yes, and then I said the true thing, which was that it was not difficult, and that this was the part frightening me.
Because I had been doing a smaller version of it for two years already. Not confronting. Not asking twice. Letting a warm explanation sit where a straight answer should have been.
Six months of deliberate silence turned out to be a skill I already had, and I had built it in that marriage without noticing, and I have needed to be honest about that in a room with a professional since.
The physical part was worse than the deceit. I carried twins to thirty-five weeks in a state of permanent low-grade readiness, with a go-bag in the boot of a car that was in my own name — the one thing I had quietly moved in the August — and a copy of everything in a safe deposit box at a credit union eleven miles away.
I had a blood pressure problem from about week thirty. It was managed and it was fine. I have never once been told it was connected to anything and I have never once fully believed that.
The complaint to the state licensing board was drafted in the September and sat in Beatrix Nwankwo’s drawer, finished, unfiled, for eleven weeks.
I went to their Thanksgiving. I let Adelaide put her hand on my stomach. I said thank you for the crib.
And on the day I went into labour, at eleven weeks and four days before I expected to, Beatrix Nwankwo was on the first page of my hospital notes as the person to call.
