That was what I could not forgive her for, back then.
She did not even slam the door.
That night, after I dropped Ashley at her condo in Buckhead, I turned the SUV around.
I drove sixty miles of dark county road. At mile marker 41, my headlights picked up a small green rectangle in the dirt.
The twenty.
It was still there.
A crushed beer can had rolled against it and pinned it down.
Emily had not touched it.
I knelt in the gravel and picked it up.
It was damp and gritty, and it smelled like rain.
I folded it once and put it in my wallet, over my heart.
In the morning, I called a man named Ray Dalton.
He was fifty-eight, a retired GBI financial investigator who had once found four hundred thousand missing dollars in a church building fund by reading the pastor’s grocery receipts.
