From the outside, my husband Matthew Ellison seemed like the perfect partner. He was responsible, attentive in public, and ambitious in a way that impressed our friends and business associates. People often told me that I was lucky to have married a man who appeared so stable and focused on building a future.
We lived in a large modern house in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. On weekends we usually walked to cafés near the lakefront, had long breakfasts, and sometimes spent afternoons strolling around Millennium Park while discussing our plans for investments and travel like any comfortable upper middle class couple living in the city.
When he told me that his company had offered him a position in Seattle, I was the first person to celebrate the news. I remember standing in the kitchen with a glass of wine while he explained the opportunity with excitement shining in his eyes.
“This is the step I’ve been waiting for,” Matthew said confidently. “Just two years, Brooke. After that we can expand our investments here in Chicago and maybe even launch our own company together.”
Two years apart sounded difficult, but I believed in our marriage and in the future we had been planning together.
During those two years I would stay in Chicago and manage everything we owned. That included several rental properties we had in Evanston and Naperville as well as our stock investments and other financial projects.
I trusted him completely because he was my husband and because I loved him.
Everything would have continued normally if not for something that happened three days before his supposed flight. That afternoon Matthew came home earlier than usual carrying several boxes from a storage store. He placed them in the living room with visible enthusiasm.
“I’m getting prepared,” he said while cutting the tape on one box. “Living costs are higher out there, so I want to take some useful things with me.”
While he went upstairs to shower, I entered the home office because I needed to find some documents related to one of our rental contracts. His laptop was open on the desk.
I was not searching for anything unusual. I only wanted to locate a digital copy of a lease agreement for one of our tenants.