Chapter 2: The Pattern in the Dark
I called my attorney before the morning nurse even came to check my vitals.
"Daniel," I said quietly, so I wouldn't wake my daughter.
"Pull everything on Vance Global Enterprises.
Every filing.
Every transfer date."
A pause.
Then: "Genevieve…
how much are we talking?"
"Six transfers.
All from my grandmother's trust.
All while I was married to him."
Another silence — longer this time.
"That's not a coincidence," Daniel said.
"That's a pattern."
I looked at my daughter's face.
She was so small.
So completely unaware of what her father had done.
My phone buzzed with a second notification.
Not from Julian this time.
It was from Eleanor — his mother.
The message was three words:
*You should stay home.*
My hand tightened around the phone.
She knew.
She had always known.
I set the phone face-down on the tray and picked up the brown folder instead.
Inside were the documents my grandmother's estate lawyer had quietly flagged eighteen months ago — transfers I had dismissed as accounting errors during the worst of our fertility treatments, when I was too exhausted and too heartbroken to look closely.
Julian hadn't just left me.
He had been preparing to leave me for a long time.
May you like
And someone had helped him move the money before I ever signed a single divorce paper.
I just didn't yet know who else was in that room when it happened.
