Chapter 5: What Kayla Found
She called me two days later.
I almost didn't answer.
The number wasn't saved and I had spent forty-eight hours trying not to think about what Eric had said on that porch — *there are things about this situation that you haven't been told* — while simultaneously feeding Chloe her morning treatment and pretending to function.
I answered on the fourth ring.
"It's Kayla."
A pause.
Then: "Can we meet?
Without Barbara.
Without Eric.
Just us."
I looked at Chloe in her bouncer, watching the mobile above her with absolute concentration.
"Where?" I said.
We met at a coffee shop two towns over.
Kayla was already there when I arrived, both hands around a mug she wasn't drinking from.
She looked like she hadn't slept.
I sat down across from her.
"He's been lying to me too," she said.
No preamble.
"I need you to know that first."
"Okay."
"I went through his email last night." She set down the mug.
"I know that's not — I know.
But after what his mother said, I couldn't just sit there."
"What did you find?"
She opened her phone and turned it toward me.
It was an email chain.
The address at the top was Eric's.
The one he was writing to I didn't recognize at first — a name I'd never heard, a personal account, nothing professional about it.
I read the first message.
Then the second.
Then I set the phone down on the table.
"How long?" I said.
"The chain goes back fourteen months," Kayla said.
Fourteen months.
Chloe was four months old.
Which meant this had started — whatever *this* was — two months before Eric had even left me.
"He wasn't leaving you for me," Kayla said.
Her voice was flat.
Not cruel.
Just flat, the way a voice gets when someone has been crying for two days and has run out of feeling.
"He was leaving you for her.
I was — I think I was just convenient.
Someone to move in with while he figured out how to get to her."
I looked at the phone again.
"Who is she?"
"Her name is Dana.
She works at the investment firm he consults for." Kayla wrapped both hands around the mug again.
"She's married.
Her husband is Eric's client."
The coffee shop was warm and smelled like cinnamon.
A woman at the next table was laughing at something on her phone.
"There's more," Kayla said.
I waited.
"The money he moved — the forty-two thousand — it didn't just go to the second account." She reached into her bag and put a folded paper on the table between us.
"He transferred a portion of it to Dana.
Eleven thousand.
Three weeks before Chloe was born."
I unfolded the paper.
It was a screenshot of a transfer confirmation.
Eric's account number.
Dana's name.
"He took money from us," I said.
"From me and Chloe.
And he gave it to her."
"Yes."
I sat with that for a moment.
"Does she know about Chloe?" I said.
"I don't think so.
Not from what I read." Kayla hesitated.
"He told her you were separated.
That the pregnancy was — he called it a mistake he was dealing with."
A mistake he was dealing with.
Chloe, that morning, had grabbed my finger while I was adjusting her breathing mask and held on so tightly I had to stop and just stand there.
"Why are you telling me this?" I said.
Kayla looked at me steadily.
"Because he's going to use whatever he knows — whatever he said on that porch — to slow down any legal action you take.
He's going to make it complicated and expensive and exhausting, and he's going to bet that you'll give up."
"I won't."
"I know." She pushed the folded paper closer to me.
"That's why I'm giving you this."
I picked it up.
"There's something else," she said.
"In the emails.
He mentioned a property.
A rental property he bought eighteen months ago.
It's not in his name — it's in his cousin's name.
But the payments come from his account."
I looked up.
"He hid an asset," she said.
"Before he left you.
Before the accounts were frozen for any legal process." She paused.
"I think he planned this for a long time."
The woman at the next table laughed again.
I folded the paper carefully and put it in my bag.
"You should talk to a lawyer," Kayla said.
"Today if you can."
"I will."
She looked down at her mug.
"I'm sorry.
For everything.
For opening that door the way I did.
For what I said."
I didn't tell her it was fine.
It wasn't fine.
But I said, "Thank you for this."
She nodded once.
I was almost to the door when she called after me.
"He's going to find out I talked to you," she said.
"When he does, he's not going to be quiet about it."
May you like
I looked back at her.
"Neither am I," I said.
