Chapter 5 - THE HOUSE OF CARDS
-5-
The taxi ride back to our boutique hotel was conducted in a heavy, fragile silence. Miles stared out the window at the passing palm trees and historic townhouses, his small fingers tracing the rubber edge of his backpack zipper. He didn't ask any more questions about the man we had just left behind on East Bay Street. Children possess an instinctive, razor-sharp emotional intelligence; he understood, long before I did, that the stranger in the tailored navy suit wasn't coming back to fix the past.
Once we locked the hotel room door behind us, I let out a long, shuddering breath that felt as though it had been trapped in my lungs for three years.
"Are you okay, buddy?" I asked, kneeling down in front of Miles as he sat on the edge of the bed.
He nodded slowly, wiping his nose with the back of his sleeve. "I'm okay, Mom. I'm just glad we didn't stay there long."
"Me too," I whispered, kissing his forehead. "Let's pack our bags. We're catching the earliest flight back to Providence tonight."
"Can we get ice cream at the airport?" he asked, a tiny, hopeful spark returning to his voice.
"Two scoops," I promised.
While Miles gathered his comic books and packed his clothes back into his suitcase, I sat at the small wooden desk by the window and opened my laptop. The adrenaline of the confrontation was slowly fading, leaving behind the sobering reality of what came next. Gregory Vance had built a multi-million-dollar life on a foundation of stolen identity, bigamy, and federal fraud. He couldn't just walk away from this unpunished, and neither could I.
I opened a blank document and began typing out a detailed timeline of events, cross-referencing our marriage certificate, the original police missing person reports from Block Island, the Coast Island search logs, and the corporate directory screenshots of Vance Architecture & Design.
My phone buzzed on the desk.
I glanced down at the screen. It was an unknown number, originating from a South Carolina area code. I hesitated for a second before swiping the screen and bringing it to my ear.
"Hello?"
"Clara? It’s... it’s Chloe."
The voice on the other end was strained, breathless, and cracking with exhaustion. She sounded like a woman who had spent the last hour vomiting in a hotel bathroom.
"Chloe," I said, my tone neutral, neither warm nor hostile.
"I'm sitting in my car outside our office," she said, her voice shaking violently. "He's gone. He packed a bag from the downtown loft and drove off twenty minutes ago. I... I don't know what to do. The police are already on their way. I called them the second I got back inside."
"You did the right thing," I said quietly.
"Right thing?" A bitter, hysterical laugh broke through her tears. "My entire life is a lie, Clara! I invested my family's inheritance into this firm. I signed mortgages with a man whose name isn't even real! Do you have any idea what this does to me? To my company?"
"I know," I said, feeling a genuine wave of empathy for her. She had been scammed just as thoroughly as I had, albeit in a very different way. "He’s a professional fraudster, Chloe. He knows how to wear a mask and play the devoted partner until the walls start closing in."
"What happens now?" she whispered, her voice trembling. "Will he go to prison?"
"Bigamy, identity theft, insurance fraud, financial deception across state lines," I rattled off calmly. "If the federal prosecutors have any teeth at all, he won't see daylight for the next ten to fifteen years."
A heavy silence hung on the line, broken only by the sound of Chloe’s ragged breathing.
"I'm sorry, Clara," she murmured softly. "For him. For everything."
"Me too, Chloe," I said. "Goodbye."
I ended the call, sliding my phone onto the desk.
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By midnight, Miles and I were seated in row 14 of a red-eye flight heading back north. As the jet taxied down the runway and lifted off into the starless night sky, I looked out the window at the twinkling lights of Charleston fading into the dark Atlantic.
The ghost was gone. The mystery was solved. And as the plane banked northward toward home, I knew that whatever challenges awaited us back in Rhode Island, we were finally walking into them with our eyes wide open.
