The name beside the number was Denise. I recognized it immediately. She was the woman my husband always described as an old friend from the farmers market. I called her from my phone and asked whether she’d spoken to him recently. She went silent, then asked, “Did you find the notebook?” I asked what she knew about it. She told me my husband had been meeting her every Tuesday and Thursday because they were trying to track down several things that had disappeared from our family over the years. She said he had never told her the whole story, only that someone was quietly moving our valuables.
I went back to the list and added up the numbers myself. The total matched almost exactly the amount of money my husband had recently withdrawn from our joint savings. I confronted him when he came home. He didn’t deny the withdrawals. Instead, he told me he’d been buying back family heirlooms from a dealer in Paducah after discovering that someone had been selling them one by one. The Franklin sets, my father’s watch, and even Grandma’s ring had all been listed for sale under different names. Then I noticed something I’d missed: the phone number beside Denise’s name wasn’t hers.
I called it anyway. A man answered and asked who I was. When I mentioned my husband’s name, he immediately hung up. Denise called me seconds later and told me to lock the doors. She had finally figured out who was selling the items — and it wasn’t a stranger. The person had access to our house, knew exactly where everything was kept, and had been using my husband’s notebook to identify what was still there. I looked at the final page again. Under the total was a second handwritten note: “One item remains. She doesn’t know it’s missing yet.”
