Chapter 4: The Woman Who Answered His Phone
My attorney's name was Patricia Hale.
She had short gray hair, reading glasses on a chain around her neck, and the kind of voice that made people pay attention without her having to raise it.
My sister had recommended her.
Patricia had handled her friend's divorce two years earlier and had, in her words, "left nothing on the table."
I met with her the morning after Eric left.
She spread the bank statements across her desk and studied them without speaking for almost a full minute.
"Eleven months," she said.
"Yes."
"And the account is solely in his name?"
"Yes.
I only found out because he used our home address when he opened it.
The statement came in a window envelope.
I thought it was junk mail." I paused.
"I almost threw it away."
Patricia looked up over her glasses.
"But you didn't."
"I almost did.
Then I saw his name on the second line."
She made a note.
"How much total?"
"Just over forty thousand dollars."
She set her pen down.
"He moved forty thousand dollars out of your joint account over eleven months, into a private account, while you were pregnant with triplets."
"Yes."
"Did he ever mention financial concerns?
Debt?
A specific reason he might claim justified this?"
"He said he was protecting himself.
Those were his exact words."
Patricia picked her pen back up.
"That's an interesting choice of words." She wrote something I couldn't read from across the desk.
"I want to subpoena the full account history.
If he was moving money out, I want to know where it was going."
I nodded.
"There's something else."
She looked up.
"When he left last night, he said he was getting a hotel.
But I still have the location-sharing app on his phone.
We set it up two years ago when he traveled for work.
He never turned it off." I slid my phone across the desk.
"He didn't go to a hotel."
Patricia looked at the screen.
A small blue dot sitting still on a residential street across town.
"Do you know that address?" she said.
"I looked it up this morning.
It's registered to a woman named Cara Simmons."
The room was very quiet.
"How long have you known about her?" Patricia said.
"I didn't.
Not until this morning."
She studied the screen for another moment, then slid the phone back to me.
"I'm going to need you to screenshot that location with the timestamp.
Don't confront her.
Don't contact him about it.
Just send it to me."
"Okay."
"And I need you to think carefully.
Is there anything else — any other account, any other name, any other address — that felt wrong at the time but that you set aside?"
I thought about the weekend trips he'd started taking six months into my pregnancy.
Conferences, he'd said.
Team offsites.
I had been too tired and too large and too focused on getting through each day to question them.
"The conferences," I said.
"I don't think they were real."
Patricia nodded slowly, like this was not a surprise to her.
"Send me whatever you have.
Emails, calendar invites, anything."
I drove home with the windows down.
The morning was cool and the babies were with my mother and the house would be quiet when I got back.
I should have felt something settling.
Instead I felt the specific weight of understanding something you had been not-understanding for a long time.
Eric hadn't panicked when he came home and saw the divorce papers.
He had calculated.
Because he had already been preparing.
Not just the money.
All of it.
My phone buzzed on the passenger seat.
A number I didn't recognize.
I let it ring.
When I got home, there was a voicemail.
I sat in the driveway and played it.
It was a woman's voice.
Calm.
Almost rehearsed.
"I think we need to talk," she said.
"My name is Cara.
I know who you are.
And there are things about Eric that you need to hear from me directly.
Please call me back."
May you like
My hand was completely still on the phone.
She had called me.
