with you first. But you need to file a report. You also need to check your home for missing documents. Whoever this man is, he has had access to private information.”
Nathan thought of Mara’s fundraiser. Her blue dress. The kiss she had placed on his cheek at 7:05 that morning. “Pray for me,” she had said with a little smile. “Mrs. Duvall always makes me carry the heavy donation boxes.”
He had prayed for her safety on wet roads.
While she was helping another man wear his life.
“Can I have copies?” he asked.
Denise put everything into an envelope. Before handing it over, she added one more sheet.
“This came in last month. A change-of-address inquiry. Someone asked whether statements for this account could be sent to a post office box. We denied it because the request was incomplete.”
Nathan read the address. It was in a town forty miles east, a place called Larkspur.
He had never been there.
But Mara had.
She had gone three times in the last two months, supposedly to help her church sort donated coats at a regional shelter.
The room seemed to narrow around him.
Denise touched the folder. “Mr. Calloway, I have seen identity theft. This feels different. This feels rehearsed.”
Rehearsed.
The word followed him back to his truck.
He drove home through rain that had thickened into a gray curtain. Each familiar street looked slightly false. The bakery where Mara bought cinnamon rolls. The gas station where he filled her car every Saturday. The little white church where she held his hand during hymns.
At home, her car was not in the driveway.
The house greeted him with its usual quiet. The lamp by the sofa was on because Mara hated dark rooms in the afternoon. Her gardening clogs sat crooked near the back door. A cookbook lay open on the counter to a lemon bread recipe.
Everything said wife.
Everything said home.
Nathan walked through it like an intruder.
He checked the desk first. Tax folders. Insurance papers. Rebecca’s death certificate in the back of the lower drawer, where he had not touched it in years. His passport was in its sleeve, but the sleeve had been turned upside down. His birth certificate sat in the folder with the corner bent.
Mara was tidy. She never bent corners.
In the bedroom, he opened her dresser, then hated himself while he searched through scarves, old receipts, and folded sweaters that smelled like lavender. He found nothing.
Then he opened his side of the closet.
Behind his winter coats, pushed so far back the plastic had gathered dust, hung a garment bag he did not recognize.
Inside was a brown canvas jacket identical to the one he wore every Friday, a pair of steel-toed boots in his size, two plaid shirts like the ones Mara bought for him at Christmas, and a warehouse baseball cap.
Nathan’s actual cap was downstairs by the back door.
He took the duplicate into the kitchen and placed it on the table.
A costume.
Not a disguise. A costume of him.
Under the boots, wrapped in a black sock, he found a prepaid phone.
It was dead. He plugged it into the charger by the coffee maker and waited with both hands braced on
