Chapter 10: The Deposition
The conference room was on the fourteenth floor of a building downtown, and it had the particular stillness of a place where difficult things were said carefully.
Julian was already seated when I walked in.
He was in a dark suit, composed, his hands folded on the table.
He looked up when I entered.
I looked back at him and sat down across from Grace without breaking stride.
Bale was beside Julian.
Grace was beside me.
A court reporter sat at the end of the table with her machine.
A camera in the corner recorded everything.
Julian's eyes tracked me as I settled into my chair.
I didn't look at him again.
The deposition ran for four hours.
Bale questioned me first.
He was skilled — I had expected that.
He moved through the financial records slowly, asking me to confirm each transaction, each date, each amount.
He was building toward something and I could feel the shape of it: he wanted to establish that I had access to the joint account, that I had seen the statements, that I could have known.
"You reviewed the monthly statements?" he asked.
"I received them.
Julian managed the account."
"But you had access."
"I had access to the statements.
Julian managed the transfers."
"Did you ever question any of the outgoing amounts?"
"I asked Julian about the account balance several times.
He told me the money was going toward business expenses and debt repayment."
"And you accepted that explanation."
"I trusted my husband." I kept my voice level.
"That's different from not questioning it."
Bale paused.
Moved on.
He tried twice more to establish complicity — once through the car sale, suggesting I had known the proceeds were going into Julian's separate account, and once through a business dinner I had attended where one of the investors had been present.
Both times, Grace redirected with documentation.
The car sale proceeds had gone into the joint account.
The business dinner had been a social event I had attended as Julian's wife, not as a business participant.
Then Grace took over.
She was quieter than Bale.
She asked shorter questions and waited longer for the answers.
She walked me through the payslips.
The shift records.
The months where my deposits had gone in and larger amounts had come out within days.
She asked me to describe, in my own words, what Julian had told me about the company's financial situation during each of those periods.
I described it.
All of it.
The reassurances.
The explanations.
The late nights where he had sat at the kitchen table with spreadsheets open and told me we were almost through the worst of it.
At one point, I glanced at Julian.
He was looking at the table.
Near the end of the session, Grace asked me a question she had not prepared me for.
"In your own words — what did you believe you were doing during those three years?"
I thought about it for a moment.
"I believed I was keeping us alive," I said.
"So that he could rebuild.
I thought that was what we had agreed to.
I thought we were partners."
The room was very quiet.
"And now?" Grace asked.
Bale started to object.
Grace withdrew the question before he finished.
She didn't need the answer on the record.
The answer was already in the room.
After the deposition, Grace and I rode the elevator down together.
"He looked at the table," I said.
"I noticed."
"Is that good?"
"It means he heard you." She adjusted the strap of her bag.
"It doesn't change his legal position.
But it means some part of him understood what you said." She paused.
"That sometimes matters at the settlement stage."
"I thought they stopped making offers."
"They did." The elevator opened.
"But depositions have a way of restarting conversations."
She was right.
Bale called Grace the following morning.
Julian wanted to talk — not through lawyers.
Directly.
One conversation, no recording, just the two of us.
May you like
Grace told me I didn't have to.
I said I would.
