Transgressions by Carolyn Faulkner (the reading list txt) 📕

"They'll be gone in the next fifteen minutes," he said and hung up the phone.

Ally wasn't sure whether he was angry with her or not, but she wasn't going to worry about it. She'd certainly find out, tonight, if he was. She checked her watch. Eleven-forty-five. And he was as good as his word; they were gone by noon.

Around one thirty, he texted her, asking her to scan a document he needed that was on his desk and email it to him. She walked into his office, where she rarely went, and located it easily—it was on top of a slew of spreadsheets that caught her eye, and then, when she moved them, there were also what looked like surveillance reports beneath them.

What intrigued her about them and had her bothering with them at all was the fact that she recognized the account numbers that were listed along the left side—with their withdrawals, deposits, beginning and ending balances filling out the information to the right.

And they were her accounts—well, the family's accounts. But some of them were her personal accounts, too. And the reports, even just with a quick skim, she could see that they were almost entirely about her—her trips to the grocery store, her trips to the doctor, who came to see her, who she went to see.

Although she wasn't the type to spy—she'd never checked her lover's answering machine messages while he wasn't around, even when he wasn't Enzo Matroni, never scrolled through his texts or tried to read his email. She knew that, if something wasn't right, she'd find out about it soon enough, one way or the other. And because of who she was, there were precious few men who would have had the guts to cheat on her.

But she had to make an exception, considering the information she held in her hand was, essentially, everything about her and what had been her family, and it had obviously been thoroughly perused—parts of it were highlighted, some items were circled in red or underlined in blue. Everything—credit scores, credit card balances, names of her friends, names of her men, her business associates—right down to the names of the men she'd dated since she was—

Tears filled her eyes and she began to crumple the top page. Anger surged through her the likes of which she had never felt. But then she forced herself to release the page. Stiffly, she turned to do exactly what he'd asked her to—she scanned the innocuous piece of paper he wanted into her phone and emailed it to him, sending him a text when she was through, then turning to head into the bedroom.

When Enzo locked his car and began to walk up to the back door, which was the door everyone but Girl Scouts and bottle drive people used, he saw that there was something unusual pinned to the door. It was probably a flyer about something and he frowned. If she'd let him keep his men around the place, they would never have made it this far.

He checked his cell habitually one more time, but she hadn't sent him anything in a while—since she'd sent the email—but then, he hadn't sent her anything, either. He'd been extremely busy, still cleaning up after Frank Antonelli. But when he got to the door, his heart hit the pavement beneath him and he began to kick himself.

He'd sent her into his office to look for a piece of paper for him that wasn't all that pressing—just something he wanted to take care of before he forgot about it—but he'd forgotten that it rested upon all of the printouts he had about her. She must've seen every bit of damning evidence and tacked a handful of it up on his door. He knew he didn't even need to bother to go into the house. She was gone. He had no doubt at all.

But, of course, he had to put himself through it and he went inside. The house was eerily quiet. She almost always had something on in the background of whatever she was doing—usually cooking him dinner, which he'd never asked her to do, but she apparently enjoyed and he certainly wasn't going to tell her not to.

All of the little tchotchkes she'd left around the place were gone, even the magnets on the fridge, her knitting, her celebrity magazines, her favorite pink coffee mug that had sat on the counter next to his—well, not really, he thought with a painful smile. They'd had a running feud going that they never talked about, but they each liked their cup of coffee in the morning and the Keurig only dispensed one at a time, so they were constantly replacing the other person's coffee mug with their own just to see who got the first cup of the day. He thought he was probably ahead in the game because he usually got up earlier than she did, but that hardly mattered now.

He even went as far as the bedroom, finding the crushing blow on the top of his dresser—the two rings he had given her had been placed there with care, where he was unlikely to miss them. He picked them up and kissed them, then put them in his pocket. The rest of the room looked exactly as it had when he'd lived here alone—she'd been very thorough. Of course, they really hadn't settled anything important between them, so there wasn't that much stuff of hers here. She still had the home she grew up in—

Her house! She could be there!

He drove himself in record time, only to get there in time to see a real estate agent pounding a 'For Sale' sign into the front yard. "Where is she?" he growled, frightening the poor man to death, inches from grabbing him by the lapels and shaking him like a rag doll.

"She, who?" he asked.

"The woman who owns this house!" he roared.

The man actually cringed. "M-Miss Cerone called