He Took Her On My Anniversary Trip, I Took It Out Of His Expense Report

Georgia Kettleman had kept the books for four businesses out of two rooms on Vestry Street since 2016, and she still ran anything over four figures through a mechanical adding machine, because a number on a screen can be revised into a different number without leaving a mark.

She had planned Charleston in October, on a Sunday afternoon with a legal pad. Two nights at the Bellwright for a twentieth anniversary. Deposit on her own card, nonrefundable after the fifteenth of January.

In February her husband stood in the kitchen with his keys in his hand and said the water plant expansion would eat the weekend.

In April the quarterly receipt batch came down from the firm in a banker's box, and the Bellwright folio came out of the middle of it on heavy cream stock. Two nights, the fourteenth and the fifteenth. A couples treatment, ninety minutes. Second guest, VEGE, M. Total, four thousand one hundred eighty dollars.

On the back, in the block where the submitting employee writes the project code, in a hand she had been reading since 1999: 22-041.

The Cardwell County Water Authority expansion. Cost reimbursable. A public body, a board, and a monthly invoice packet that had already paid for a bathrobe.

Georgia coded it exactly as submitted.

A standalone cheating husband, betrayal, wife gets revenge short story.