Chapter 1 - The Awakening
Megan arrived in her rusted Subaru exactly twenty minutes after I called her.
She aggressively threw my heavy suitcases into the trunk and immediately blasted the heater.
I sat shivering uncontrollably in the passenger seat while the freezing rain hammered against the windshield.
Megan did not ask a single question until we were safely inside her warm living room in Queen Anne.
She handed me a steaming mug of chamomile tea and wrapped a thick wool blanket around my shoulders.
I took a shaky breath and told her everything about the ferry dock.
I described his cold eyes, the ridiculous excuse about an emergency, and the pale blue cashmere scarf.
Megan stared at me with a mixture of profound pity and simmering rage.
She told me I needed to rest, but my mind was spinning far too fast for sleep.
I was a forensic accountant who spent her entire life tracking down hidden corporate money.
If my husband was hiding a mistress, he was inevitably hiding financial assets as well.
I opened my work laptop, connected to Megan’s encrypted Wi-Fi, and logged into our joint banking portal.
At first glance, our checking and savings accounts looked perfectly normal.
But Ethan had forgotten that I still had access to the master password for his private wealth management dashboard.
I bypassed the dual-factor authentication by routing the confirmation code to his old backup email address.
The screen loaded, revealing a labyrinth of newly created subsidiary accounts.
I clicked on a recent wire transfer that made my heart completely stop in my chest.
Ethan had quietly moved exactly four hundred and thirty thousand dollars into a brand new holding company.
May you like
I pulled the public registration records for the LLC to see who owned it.
The company was co-signed by Ethan and his twenty-four-year-old administrative assistant.
