Two years apart sounded difficult, but I believed in our marriage and in the future we had been planning together.
During those two years I would stay in Chicago and manage everything we owned. That included several rental properties we had in Evanston and Naperville as well as our stock investments and other financial projects.
I trusted him completely because he was my husband and because I loved him.
Everything would have continued normally if not for something that happened three days before his supposed flight. That afternoon Matthew came home earlier than usual carrying several boxes from a storage store. He placed them in the living room with visible enthusiasm.
“I’m getting prepared,” he said while cutting the tape on one box. “Living costs are higher out there, so I want to take some useful things with me.”
While he went upstairs to shower, I entered the home office because I needed to find some documents related to one of our rental contracts. His laptop was open on the desk.
I was not searching for anything unusual. I only wanted to locate a digital copy of a lease agreement for one of our tenants.