A shiver of revulsion went down my spine, but I ignored it. I plugged in the external hard drive Mr. Henderson had given me. While the data transferred, I started opening folders.
The folder labeled “Project Phoenix” caught my eye. I clicked it. It wasn’t a business plan. It was an exit strategy.
There were PDFs of brochures for villas in Costa Rica. There were bank statements for an account I didn’t know existed—an account under the name of a shell company called Phoenix Consulting. I opened the statements. My breath hitched.
Transfer: $5,000 – “Consulting fee.”
Transfer: $12,000 – “Marketing services.”
Transfer: $25,000 – “Seed capital.”
I cross-referenced the dates with our joint checking account. Every time Richard had asked me for money for his “startup costs” or “overhead,” he had immediately funneled it into this private account.
And the withdrawals:
$1,500 – Tiffany & Co.
The bracelet I saw Monica wearing last week.
$2,800 – The Stork’s Nest Luxury Baby Gear.
$3,200 – Emerald City Obstetrics.
He was funding her entire lifestyle and their future getaway with my money. The total amount siphoned over the last two years was nearly $280,000.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
I found a digital folder labeled “Legal.” Inside was a draft of a custody agreement—for me. I opened it, confused. Why would there be a custody agreement? We didn’t have children.
I read the text, and the blood froze in my veins. It was a petition for involuntary commitment. Richard had been documenting “evidence” of my mental instability. He had notes about my mood swings from the hormones I took during IVF, my depression grieving my miscarriages, and my “paranoia.”
Plan A: divorce her after the trust fund clears.
Plan B: if she fights the prenup, prove she is mentally incompetent to manage her estate. Have Richard appointed as conservator.
He wasn’t just going to leave me if I fought back. He was planning to have me locked up and take control of my fortune that way. He wanted to pull a Britney Spears on me.
I sat back in the leather chair, staring at the glowing screen. The cruelty was bottomless. This man whom I had nursed through the flu, whose debts I had paid, whose ego I had stroked for a decade—he looked at me and saw nothing but an ATM machine he needed to hack.
The hard drive beeped. Transfer complete.
I pulled the drive out and slipped it into my bra. I shut down the computer. I wiped my fingerprints off the keyboard and the desk surface. I stood up and looked around the room. I wanted to smash everything. I wanted to take a golf club to his monitors, but I couldn’t. Not yet. I needed the big money to drop. I needed them to think they had won.
I walked out of the office and locked the door. My hands were shaking, but not from fear anymore. They were shaking with the adrenaline of the hunt.
I went downstairs and poured myself a glass of wine. I sat in the dark living room and dialed my father.
“Dad,” I said when he picked up.
“Laura, is everything okay? It’s late.”
“No, Dad. Everything is wrong. But I need you to listen to me, and I need you to not get angry. I need you to help me destroy him.”
There was a pause on the line. Then Arthur Reynolds’ voice came through, low and dangerous as a growling tiger.
“Tell me everything.”
My parents’ estate was an hour away, a sprawling property on the waterfront that Richard always coveted. He used to walk the grounds and say, “One day this will be ours.” I used to think he meant it as a shared legacy. Now I knew he meant it as a conquest.
I sat in my father’s study the next day. The room was lined with books and smelled of old paper and pipe tobacco. My mother, Catherine, sat next to me on the leather sofa, holding my hand. She hadn’t said a word since I played the recording of the phone call and showed them the documents from the hard drive. She just held my hand, her grip surprisingly strong.
My father stood by the window, looking out at the gray ocean. He was seventy years old, but he still had the posture of a general.
“Involuntary commitment,” he repeated, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. “He was going to try to declare you insane to get control of the assets if the divorce got messy.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice steady. “He knew the prenup protects the principal of the trust, but not the income generated during the marriage if he controls the accounts.”
“I should kill him,” my father said simply.
He turned around and his eyes were cold.
“I have friends, Laura. He could just disappear.”
“No,” I said. “That’s too easy. And I don’t want you going to jail for a worm like him. I want him to suffer. I want him to think he’s won the lottery and then realize the ticket is fake. I want him to be humiliated in front of everyone he tried to impress. And I want Monica to realize she bet on a losing horse.”
My mother finally spoke.
“The trust distribution,” she said. “That’s what they are waiting for. The five million.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “Next month.”
“We stop it,” my father said. “I’ll call the lawyers. We freeze everything.”
“If we freeze it now, he’ll know,” I argued. “He’ll panic. He’ll hide the assets he’s already stolen—the $280,000. He’ll delete the evidence. He’ll spin the narrative that I’m the crazy one. I need to catch him in the act of trying to steal the big pot.”
My father sat down at his desk, steepling his fingers.
“So, you want to trap him?”
“I want to dangle the carrot,” I said. “I want to make the carrot bigger. Five million is good, but ten million—ten million makes people sloppy.”
My father smiled, a slow, predatory grin that I recognized from his business negotiation days.
“You want me to restructure the trust, or at least pretend to?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Tell him you’re so impressed with how he’s handled whatever fake business he talks to you about that you want to move the assets early, but to avoid taxes, we need to move it into a joint investment vehicle.”
“Something he has to sign for,” my father mused. “A liability trap. We set up a shell company. We make it look like an investment fund. We transfer assets into it, but actually we transfer debt, or we make him sign a personal guarantee for a loan to buy into the fund.”
“Make him sign a personal guarantee for a ten-million-dollar credit line,” I suggested. “Tell him it’s to leverage the investment. He’ll sign anything if he thinks he gets access to the cash.”
“And once he signs that guarantee,” my father continued, “we call the loan. He’ll be personally liable for ten million he doesn’t have.”
“He’ll be bankrupt,” I said. “And this time I won’t be there to bail him out.”
My mother squeezed my hand.
“And the girl, Monica,” she said. “She wants a baby shower.”
“I’m going to give her one,” I said, my voice hardening. “That’s where we drop the hammer. I want the papers served there. I want the revelation to happen there.”
My mother nodded.
“I’ll handle the catering. We’ll make sure it’s an event to remember.”
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