A final image appeared in the story: Carson and the same guy were standing outside the restaurant, but this was more of a body shot. Andrea was about to click past it, but she noticed that Carson’s messenger bag was printed with a familiar herringbone pattern. She looked closer. Was that Goyard? Her mother had a tote with the same print, except hers was navy. Cynthia didn’t own a handbag that cost less than a normal person’s monthly mortgage. After a quick Internet search, she found the messenger style’s price: $2,100.

This guy had an Audi and an expensive bag, and yet he worked as an assistant at a preschool? Did Carson have some sort of lucrative side hustle? Maybe his family was wealthy after all?

She sat up straighter and typed in Silver Swans’ web address. The school had an audit board, though most of the people on it were parents. If she called and checked, would she find out that Carson was the one managing the accounting? The paper Ronnie took from Piper’s office. Maybe it was a balance sheet. Some sort of cash record after all. She’d heard about schools doctoring invoices. Last year, there were nuns who’d done it at a Catholic school in Iowa.

She slid off the bed. “Honey?” she called to Arthur, who was still in the bathroom. “I’m running to the mailbox, okay?”

The grass was wet with dew, chilling her bare feet as she ran across the lawn. The mailbox hinges creaked as she pulled open the door. The box was stuffed with letters; she’d kind of forgotten mail existed in the past few days. She grabbed the stack between her palms and hurried back to the house, then spilled all the mail onto the couch.

“Whoa!” Arthur exclaimed, mixing up the junk mail, magazines, bills, like the pile was a stew. At first, Andrea didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but then there it was—an unmarked white envelope, thin with only a single sheet of paper. USPS was on the ball. Andrea tore it open and stared at the swarm of numbers on the page. They marched across six Excel columns and down at least twenty rows—more than a hundred numbers in all. But they didn’t look like expenses—the numbers were too big, and there were no decimal points or dollar signs. They were too long to be social security numbers.

Credit card numbers, maybe? Some of them started with the same four digits. Then, Andrea spotted the beginning numbers for the bank account at First National she’d set up when she moved here. The more she looked, the more she noticed other numbers with the same beginning digits. Were these bank accounts?

Actually, wait a minute.

She stared hard at the numbers in one particular Excel square. Unless she was losing her mind, that was her bank account number. Exactly.