“Then we need to establish exactly what he is trying to hide.”
I took a slow breath.
“Understood.”
After the call ended, I placed the note inside a clear document sleeve.
I wasn’t going to chase Julian.
I wasn’t going to beg Elena for answers.
And I wasn’t going to let fear make decisions for me.
But I was going to find out what had happened to the money.
Because the one thing Julian had never understood about me was this:
I could survive the end of a marriage.
I could survive the humiliation of discovering an affair.
I could even survive learning that the man I loved had never been the person I believed him to be.
What I would not do was allow him to turn my trust into a weapon against me.
And if the truth revealed something worse than infidelity, I was prepared to face it.
The next morning, Mr. Collins called me at 8:15.
He had received the first batch of financial records.
And there was one transfer in particular that he wanted me to see.
A transfer made three days before Julian asked me to help settle his debt.
A transfer worth $150,000.
The money had gone into an account associated with a company I had never heard of.
And the person authorized to access that account was not Julian.
It was Elena.
I stared at the document.
Then I whispered the only question that mattered.
“Why would Julian ask me to pay a debt if the money was already gone?”
Mr. Collins looked at me through the video call.
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
I leaned back in my chair.
For the first time since the previous morning, I felt something other than anger.
I felt fear.
Not because I thought Julian could take my house.
Not because I worried that he might leave me.
But because I was beginning to understand that the betrayal I had prepared for might only be the surface of something much more complicated.
And somewhere, Elena knew the truth.
