Chapter 7: The Woman Before Priya
Her name was Diane.
It took me four days to find her, and I didn't find her alone.
After Greg left Claire's house that morning, I made the call I'd mentioned — to a woman named Ros, a retired family court advocate I'd known for twenty years.
Ros had spent three decades watching men like Greg move through systems designed to give them the benefit of the doubt.
She knew what evidence looked like before it was called evidence.
She knew which questions to ask and in what order.
"You have three women," Ros said, when I laid it out for her at her kitchen table.
"Possibly four.
You have a pattern of complaints followed by manufactured counter-evidence.
You have a man who prepared his fiancée against her own mother before the mother had done anything wrong." She tapped her pen against her notepad.
"That last part is important.
That's not jealousy or insecurity.
That's a system."
"How do we find the fourth woman?"
"We ask the three we have."
Hannah didn't know a name.
Priya, when Ros reached her by phone, went quiet for a long moment and then said, "There was someone.
Before me.
He mentioned her once — said she'd been unstable.
That she'd made things difficult for him.
He said her name was Diane and that she'd moved away."
"Moved away where?" Ros asked.
"He said she'd gone back to her family.
He said it like it was her fault."
It took Ros two more days.
Diane had moved to her sister's house in a town three hours north.
She had not spoken about Greg to anyone outside that house in fourteen months.
She agreed to a video call.
I sat beside Ros and watched Diane's face appear on the screen — a woman in her mid-thirties, careful eyes, the particular stillness of someone who has spent a long time being very controlled about what she lets show.
"I want to be clear," Diane said, before either of us spoke.
"I'm not doing this for a legal case.
I'm doing this because someone is about to marry him."
"We know," Ros said.
"That's why we called."
Diane told us about eighteen months of escalating pressure.
The way he appeared at places she hadn't told him she'd be.
The way her friends slowly stopped calling — she'd found out later that he'd contacted two of them privately, said things about her that weren't true, things just plausible enough that they'd pulled back without confronting her.
The way a letter appeared at her workplace — unsigned, describing a version of her that she didn't recognize but that her manager had found troubling enough to mention.
"I couldn't prove any of it," Diane said.
"Every single thing had an explanation.
Every single thing could have been a coincidence.
That's how he works.
Nothing is ever one thing.
It's always twenty small things and by the time you try to describe it to someone, you sound paranoid."
"Did you ever document anything?" Ros asked.
"I kept a journal.
I still have it." She paused.
"I also kept the letter.
The one sent to my workplace.
I kept the envelope."
Ros leaned forward slightly.
"Is there a postmark?"
"Yes."
"And where was he that week?"
Diane almost smiled.
It didn't reach her eyes.
"He told me he was in Edinburgh for work.
I have the texts where he said so."
I thought about the envelope sitting in a drawer in a house three hours north, and a postmark that put him somewhere he'd said he wasn't.
"Diane," I said.
"Would you be willing to speak to my daughter?"
She looked at me through the screen for a long moment.
"Yes," she said.
"I would.
I should have found a way to warn someone sooner.
I told myself it was over and I just needed to move on." She looked down briefly.
"But it's not over if he's still doing it."
After the call, Ros and I sat in her kitchen for a while without speaking.
"The envelope alone isn't enough," Ros said finally.
"I know."
"But the envelope plus the journal plus three women willing to speak — that's a different conversation."
"What kind of conversation?"
Ros set her pen down.
"The kind where he has to decide whether to keep pushing or cut his losses." She looked at me.
"Men like this don't stop because they're confronted.
They stop because the cost of continuing becomes higher than the reward."
"How do we raise the cost?"
"You let Claire be the one to raise it," Ros said.
"It has to come from her.
Not from you."
I drove home thinking about that.
About what it meant to hand something this heavy to your daughter and trust her to carry it.
My phone rang as I pulled into my street.
Claire.
"He called," she said.
"He wants to meet.
May you like
He says he has something to show me.
Something about you."
