He hung up the phone with a quiet click.

The silence of the bedroom returned, heavy and cold.

Outside, the wind threw a spray of dry snow against the thick glass of the window.

“Julian?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

He turned toward me, his face completely devoid of expression.

It was the face he wore when he was executing a business transaction, cold and distant.

“That was Marcus at the gate,” Julian said.

He walked back to the bedside table and picked up the thick manila folder.

“My investigator didn’t just find the mechanic, Claire,” he said.

He opened the folder again, flipping past the bank records to a set of cargo manifests.

“The tugboat your husband operated wasn’t just pulling empty barges,” Julian said.

He laid a sheet of paper on the mattress near Emma’s sleeping form.

I looked down at the columns of numbers and dates.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Contraband,” Julian said. “Unregistered shipments coming through the Canadian border.”

He tapped a signature at the bottom of the manifest.

“Great Lakes Transit was a front for a smuggling operation run by Arthur Whitmore.”