Detective Ramirez made a note. "It's useful for us to understand that timeline."
I spent the next hour describing the letter from the bank, our argument over the Bennett land, and the way Ryan had announced his Austin trip. We discussed my crew schedule from the date of the alleged notarization, including the airline records that placed me in Seattle. When I gave her the copied document Daniel had shown me, she photographed it and noted where the original was being held. The bank, she said, had already preserved the full package submitted to its commercial lending department.
"What happens to our house?" I asked. "Not the property my father left me. The house Ryan and I live in."
"I can't give you a final answer without a title review. We have evidence suggesting the documents include your marital residence too. A civil attorney can seek safeguards while we investigate any criminal conduct. Your husband's arrest does not automatically undo every financial transaction connected to him."
That answer frightened me because it was honest. I had spent the morning watching Ryan's carefully maintained story fall apart, and some part of me wanted the rest of the world to behave just as quickly. I wanted the bank to declare all the documents void, the house to be safe, and the future to arrive clean. Ramirez was telling me that the truth could be established in a moment but that repairing what someone did with it might take much longer.
When I stepped out of the interview room, Daniel was sitting at the far end of a narrow hallway. He had loosened his tie and placed his document case upright between his feet. A vending machine hummed beside him, offering candy and bottled water to people whose problems could not be solved by either. He stood when he saw me, though I did not invite him to approach.
"How much did you know?" I asked.
He exhaled. "About the property documents? Yesterday. About the company's accounts? Longer."
"How much longer?"
"Four months."
I felt the words land one at a time. Four months of my life had included birthdays, ordinary meals, a weekend trip to see my mother's sister, and countless moments when Daniel had smiled at me across dinner tables while knowing the company was in trouble. "You sat at our house in June," I said. "You ate the pasta I made. You told me things were going well."
"I told you projects were moving. Some of them were. I didn't tell you the whole truth."
"Why?"
Daniel sat back down. "At first I believed the discrepancies could be explained by messy accounting. Ryan was moving advances between projects, and cash projections kept changing, which happens in construction. Then the unpaid subcontractor balances started accumulating while money went out to companies I couldn't connect to actual work. I confronted him, and he told me he was arranging bridge financing. He promised to show me the supporting contracts."
"And he never did?"