Chapter 4 - ANGELA CAME TO MY HOUSE
Angela came to see me without warning.
Six weeks after Arizona.
I opened the door but did not invite her in.
She looked thinner.
“I need to talk to you.”
“No.”
“Rebecca.”
“No.”
Her eyes filled.
“I know you hate me.”
“I don’t know what I feel.”
“David lied to me too.”
That almost impressed me.
“You’re trying that?”
“No.”
She shook her head.
“I knew about you.”
“Then he didn’t lie about the important part.”
Angela flinched.
Good.
Then she said:
“I didn’t know he forged your signature.”
That made me pause.
“You expect me to believe you thought the HELOC was legitimate?”
“He said you knew.”
“Why did the verification use your phone?”
Silence.
There.
“Angela.”
She started crying.
“He said the bank needed a number that wasn’t tied up in school security filters because you couldn’t take calls.”
I stared.
Even she seemed to hear how ridiculous that sounded now.
“You helped impersonate me.”
“I helped verify a document he told me you had approved.”
“With your phone.”
“Yes.”
“And you never once called me?”
Her face crumpled.
“I was sleeping with your husband.”
Exactly.
There are moments when someone explains why they behaved badly and accidentally explains why you should never trust them again.
Angela leaned against the porch railing.
“Desert Vale was supposed to be mine.”
“What?”
“The project.”
She had worked in interior design for years.
Not glamorous TV design.
Commercial staging.
Furnished rentals.
Developer packages.
She believed the Scottsdale development would become her first major ownership stake.
David offered to handle construction.
She brought design work and $60,000 from savings.
Then costs rose.
David told her he had financing.
Our financing.
My house.
My forged name.
“How much did you know about our money?”
“Not enough.”
“Did you know he was using joint funds?”
“Yes.”
“Did you care?”
Angela looked at the ground.
“I told myself you had plenty.”
I laughed.
That sentence hurt more than I expected.
“You told yourself my money didn’t matter because you thought I had enough?”
“No.”
“That is exactly what you said.”
She started to apologize.
I stopped her.
“Was the affair before or after Desert Vale?”
A long pause.
“After.”
“How long after?”
“About ten months.”
So they spent almost a year as secret business partners before becoming lovers.
That somehow made it uglier.
This had not begun with passion.
It began with deception normalized through paperwork.
May you like
Then intimacy followed.
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