The caregiver was the second name. Beside hers was an amount that made my hands go cold. The other three names belonged to people I knew. One was our next-door neighbor. One was the handyman who had been fixing things around my mother’s house for years. The fourth was my husband’s cousin. I sat on the garage floor and read the list again. Every amount was different, but every person had access to the house when I wasn’t there. Then I noticed something written beside the caregiver’s name: “Thursday — 11:00 to 1:00. No cameras.”
I called my mother’s caregiver before I confronted my husband. She sounded nervous the moment I mentioned the notebook. Then she asked me how much her name was worth. I told her the amount, and she went silent. Finally she admitted my husband had approached her months earlier and offered her money to tell him when my mother was alone. She said she thought he was worried about her safety. But he had never asked about my mother’s health. He wanted to know what she kept in the house, who visited, and whether she ever opened the locked cabinet in her bedroom. The caregiver told me she refused to help after realizing what he was really looking for.
That night I put the notebook on the kitchen table and asked my husband why he’d been paying people to track our house. He stared at it for a long time before saying, “Because someone has been coming inside, and I needed to know who.” Then he opened the locked drawer in his desk and showed me photographs taken inside my mother’s house while we were away. The photographs weren’t taken by him. They showed someone searching through the same locked cabinet my husband had been asking about. He said he’d been trying to identify the person before telling me because he was afraid I’d confront them and put my mother in danger. I looked at the final photograph, where the intruder’s face was finally visible, and recognized the person immediately. It was the one person my husband had never put on his list.
