The initials belonged to Blake. I knew because I’d seen them on his old employee paperwork. I called my accountant and asked her to pull every deposit slip from April forward. She found the same pattern every week: the register was short by roughly two hundred dollars, while a separate cash deposit appeared for almost exactly the same amount. Someone was taking cash from the store and replacing it before the books were closed. I asked her to check the deposit times. Every one had been made after closing, on a Sunday night when my husband was supposedly “just helping out.”
I confronted him with the slips on the kitchen table. He didn’t deny making the deposits. He said Blake had begged him for another chance and that he’d been trying to keep the boy from getting arrested. I asked where the missing cash was going. He finally admitted Blake had been taking it from the register and paying it back whenever he could. But then I showed him the deposit slips. The handwriting wasn’t Blake’s either. It belonged to someone who had access to the store after hours. My husband looked at the initials again and said, “That’s not Blake.” Then he went completely quiet.
I went to the store that Sunday night and waited in my car across the street. At 9:17, someone unlocked the back door. It wasn’t Blake. It was the person I’d trusted to handle the books whenever I couldn’t. I watched them carry a deposit bag inside and leave twenty minutes later. The next morning I checked the security footage and found something even worse: the same person had been coming in every Sunday since April. I called my accountant and told her not to touch the books. Then I opened the oldest file in the office and found a handwritten note from my husband dated 2018: “If the register ever starts coming up short again, check who has a key.” I looked at the key log, and the name beside the duplicate store key was my husband’s.
