Page 82 of Lies He Told Me

We then repeat the process for boxes 324 through 327.

“Would you like a private viewing room?” she asks.

“Please,” I whisper.

“Would you like us to help carry these?”

From what I read online, a million dollars, in denominations of hundreds, weighs around twenty-two pounds. Ihave no idea how many millions can fit into one of these huge safe-deposit boxes.

“Please,” I say again.

I step back. The first box is low to the floor. The two employees pull it out and lift it together. “Oh, not bad at all,” the man says. They move it into an adjoining room, a room without windows. I hear the box land on the table with a clank.

Huh.

They repeat the process with the other four. I try to act nonchalant, as if this were all standard and routine, as if the fate of my family were not hanging in the balance. But when they tell me that they’ll leave me now, and the room is all mine, I rush in and close the door behind me, my heart pounding so hard I can’t breathe.

The boxes are made of steel, around five feet long and three feet wide, a few feet deep.

I unlatch the first box and pop it open.

It’s completely empty.

I open the second box — empty.

The third, the fourth — empty. Not even a speck of dust inside.

I open the final box. Nothing inside except a large manila envelope.

I step back, dumbfounded, flattened.

Where the hell is the money?

EIGHTY-SEVEN

FOUR EMPTY BOXES AND one with nothing but a manila envelope inside. My nerves rattling, my heart slamming, my hands shaking so hard I can barely use them, the white noise inside my head drowning out all sound, I open the envelope, bearing one word,Marcie,on the outside.

I carefully dump out the contents.

A cell phone.

A handheld remote, small enough to fit in my hand, with two buttons.

A thumb drive.

And then a series of papers.

The first one is a single page. It reads, in David’s handwriting:

Marcie —

If you’re reading this, either I’m dead, you know my real identity, or both. Regardless, I’m sorry. I’m sovery sorry. Please read what I’ve enclosed here. I hope it will explain everything.

I’ve loved you since the first time I laid eyes on you at the detention center. And I always will. You and the kids are everything to me.

The second is a thick set of papers stapled together — David’s explanation to me of “everything,” apparently. But now is not the time for a trip down memory lane. There is a trained assassin waiting outside for me to deliver him money, a man who will kill me if I don’t. There is an FBI agent expecting me to deliver that money who will put me in prison and make my kids orphans if I don’t.

The one thing I don’t have is the money.

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