Imani didn't sleep that night. She sat in the living room with every light on, a kitchen knife on the coffee table, and her phone in her hand. Marcus slept on the bedroom floor. Or pretended to.
At six in the morning she called in sick for the first time in four years.
At nine, she was at the bank.
The branch manager, a kind older woman named Mrs. Delgado, pulled up the joint account and turned the screen around so Imani could see it.
Eleven withdrawals. Starting in July. Two thousand here. Three thousand there. All transferred to the betting app.
"There's something else," Mrs. Delgado said, more quietly. "I don't know if you're aware."
It was a personal loan. Ten thousand dollars. Taken out in August. Both names on it.
Imani's signature at the bottom.
She stared at it. It looked like hers. Almost. The I was wrong. She always made a little loop at the top of her I, and this one was just a straight line.
"I didn't sign this," she said.
Mrs. Delgado looked at her for a long moment. Then she took a pen and wrote a phone number on the back of a business card.
"Our fraud department," she said. "And honey? If you don't sign it, then somebody else did. You understand what that means."
Imani understood.
When she got home, Marcus was sitting at the kitchen table in yesterday's clothes. He'd made her coffee. He'd made her eggs. He'd folded the laundry. Like that was going to do something.
She sat down across from him and put the loan paper on the table between them.
He looked at it. He closed his eyes.
"How long, Marcus?"
"It started with fantasy football," he said. He couldn't look at her. "With the guys from work. Twenty bucks a week. Then the app came out, and it had all these bonuses, and I won like four hundred dollars in one night and I felt like... I felt like a genius, Imani. I felt like I was finally good at something."
"And then?"
"And then I lost it. And then I had to win it back. And then I had to win back the money I lost winning it back." He laughed. It sounded awful. "It's like a hole, and every time you climb, you dig."
"You forged my name."
"I was going to pay it back before you ever saw it."
"You gave a loan shark a picture of my face."
"He took that himself! I just told him where... I just..." Marcus finally broke. He put his head down on the table. "I'm sick. I know I'm sick. I need help, baby. Please. Don't leave me. I need you."
Imani looked at the top of his head for a long time. At the braids she used to redo for him every two weeks on Sunday nights while they watched TV.
"You don't have a gambling problem, Marcus," she said quietly. "You have a lying problem that likes football."
She went to the police station that afternoon. She brought the photograph.
The desk sergeant passed her to a detective named Alvarez, a short, tired woman with reading glasses on her head and a coffee mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST MOM. She looked at the picture for a long time.
"Vic," Alvarez said. "Shaved head, beard, black leather jacket?"
"You know him?"
"Victor Sena. We've been trying to make a case on him for three years. He runs an illegal book out of a car wash on Route 9. Lends money at three hundred percent. Everybody's scared of him, so nobody talks." She set the photo down. "He threatened you? In your home? And left this?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Alvarez sat back in her chair and looked at Imani like she was something she'd been waiting for.
"Mrs. Jenkins," she said, "how would you feel about meeting him one more time?"
Imani called Vic that night from Marcus's phone. Her hands were steady. Alvarez was sitting next to her on the couch with a recorder.
"It's Imani," she said. "Marcus's wife. I have your money. I don't want you at my house again. Not ever. Where do you want to meet?"
There was a pause on the line. Then Vic laughed softly.
"The smart one," he said. "I told you."
He named a diner. Thursday. Two in the afternoon. Back booth.
On Thursday at 1:58, Imani Jenkins walked into Rosie's Diner on Route 9 in her blue scrubs, carrying a thick white envelope.
Vic was already in the back booth, facing the door. Coffee. Pie. He smiled when he saw her.
She walked straight toward him and sat down.
This is a fictional story. Names, characters and events are invented. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.
