Chriss brother was not looking at the diamond bracelet on Tiffanys wrist. He was looking at her face. And he said, I know you. You are not Tiffany. You did this to my wife two years ago.
The woman my husband introduced as his business partner was a con artist who opened credit cards in wives names, and Chriss own brother recognized her, because she had done the exact same thing to his family two years earlier under a different name.
I found the second wallet in Chriss gym bag. Four credit cards, all in my name, Jennifer Lane, thirty one thousand dollars of debt I never knew about. Jewelry stores. Restaurants. A hotel in Scottsdale. And a four thousand eight hundred dollar bracelet from Calloway Jewelers, the one now sparkling on the wrist of the woman he called his partner.
It is for the business, Chris told me. You would not understand. My credit is bad. It is temporary. Relax. I did not relax. I called my cousin Mike, who runs the best steakhouse in town, and I filed a police report, and I waited for my husbands birthday dinner.
At the end of the night, the waiter came back with Chriss card cut in half on a silver tray, and a note, because Mike had flagged it the moment Chris handed it over, reported stolen, by the woman it belongs to, which is to say me.
And when the table turned to look, Chriss brother did not look at the bracelet. He looked at the woman, and his face changed, because he had seen her before, across a different table, two years before, running the same scheme on his own wife.
She was not a business partner. There was no business. She was a professional, the kind who finds a man willing to put his wifes name on the paperwork, and Chris had been willing, and the thirty one thousand dollars and the Scottsdale hotel and the bracelet were the harvest.
Identity theft leaves a paper trail as wide as a highway. Four accounts, a matching pattern across two families, and a police report filed the morning of the dinner. Chris and the woman, whatever her real name is, are answering for all of it now, together, which is a fitting way for two people to go down.
My credit is being restored, because a fraud affidavit and a police report are exactly what the credit bureaus were built to handle, and a woman who was home while a hotel in Scottsdale was charged to her name is not a hard case to make.
Chris and I are finished. A man who puts his wifes name on a con artists credit cards and calls it temporary has told you that your name, your credit, your whole financial life, is just material to him.
His brother and I compared notes afterward, two people the same woman had used through the same kind of man. His wife got through it. So will I. There is an odd comfort in learning you are not the first, only the latest, because it means the pattern is known and the pattern is catchable.
It is for the business, Chris said. There was no business. There was only my name, on four cards, in a second wallet, in a gym bag, and the one honest transaction in the whole scheme was my cousin Mike cutting that card in half on a silver tray.