to your operations, your schedule, your staff, and enough of your digital life to fake the rest.’
Elena clicked deeper into the file tree. There were drafts of private psychiatric petitions written by a doctor I had never met. Language about exhaustion, paranoia, emotional instability. Somebody had been preparing to describe me into silence.
The betrayal in the bedroom had been crude. This was the real violation.
Not my marriage.
My existence.
I asked Elena the only question that mattered. ‘Can we prove Brooke used my credentials?’
Her expression sharpened. ‘Yes. The login histories are sloppy. Most of the fraudulent authorizations originated from Brooke’s office or your house when you were on record with clients elsewhere. She tested a vendor transfer three weeks ago. Also’—she rotated the laptop again—’she forgot to delete a forwarded message to Julian.’
The line was short enough to read in one breath.
She’ll still be in Montreal. We have until morning.
I looked at Matteo. He was watching me, not the screen.
When we were children, he had always been the first person to ask the question behind the question. Not Are you hurt? but Who hurt you? Not What happened? but What are you going to do about it?
He asked it then without speaking.
I knew what everyone expected from him. A threat. A broken jaw. A rumor made flesh in some parking garage before dawn. For one dangerous second, the thought was tempting. Julian had thrown me into a hole and planned to bury me with paperwork. Brooke had smiled while he did it. There was a primitive part of me that wanted them afraid in their bones.
But I had not spent my life building beautiful rooms out of ruin just to hand my future back to violence.
‘No back doors,’ I said. ‘No favors. No men in alleys. I want every light turned on.’
Something eased in Matteo’s face. Respect, maybe. Or relief. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Courtrooms last longer.’
The next four hours were a blur of strategy, statements, and pain. Elena obtained emergency injunctions freezing any transfer from my firm’s reserve accounts. Matteo’s cybersecurity team pulled server logs from Brooke’s laptop and recovered deleted drafts from the home network. Rosa agreed to give a formal statement even though she was terrified. One of my senior designers, Priya, texted from the office to say Brooke had instructed the staff to tell clients I was taking a sudden wellness leave and to reroute all approvals through her until further notice.
By dawn, the picture had widened. Brooke had been skimming vendor rebates into a consulting shell. Julian had been using company reserve discussions to reassure his lenders that private liquidity was imminent. There were messages between them that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with grievance. Brooke resented building the engine of a firm that still carried my name. Julian resented needing my money, my credibility, and my public softness while privately despising both. Together, they had constructed a narrative in which I became unstable, unavailable, and finally removable.
At seven-thirty, Nia tightened the binder around my ribs and told me I was medically stupid for what I intended to do.
‘Noted,’ I said.
Matteo had sent someone to my closet for clothes. Elena chose the outfit:
