“He came to me,” she whispered. “He told me you two were over. He said you were unstable.”

“And you believed him because it was easier than feeling guilty,” I said.

She let go of my wrist and covered her face with her hands.

Her shoulders shook as she wept silently in the corner of the booth.

I sat there, watching her, feeling nothing but a hard, hollow space where my grief used to be.

The sleet outside was turning into heavy, wet snow.

It clung to the windowpane, blurring the headlights of the cars on the street.

“What am I going to do?” Chloe asked through her fingers.

“You’re going to help me,” I said.

She lowered her hands, her mascara smeared beneath her lower lashes.

“How?” she asked. “He has all the money. He has the passwords.”

“He doesn’t have the final authorization token yet,” I said.

I knew how Lucas worked. He was paranoid.

He always kept the final step of any transaction offline until the last possible second.

“He needs you to input the secondary verification code from your device,” I said. “The one linked to the Melanie Harper phone number.”