And I certainly didn’t understand, for a long time, that the money wasn’t just his vanity. It was his crime.
I found the affair first. That’s almost always how it goes. A receipt, a changed password, the particular new cologne. Six months ago, I confirmed it completely, and I sat with the grief of it for about one night.
And then the prosecutor woke up.
Because once I started actually looking — really looking, the way I used to look, with the cold clear eyes I’d let go rusty — I didn’t just find a mistress. I found everything.
I found that Garrett had f*rged my signature on loan documents, borrowing against assets that were partly mine, pledging things he had no right to pledge. I found a shell company, a fake vendor with a real bank account, registered under the name of Bianca Cross’s brother — a classic structure, the kind I’d unwound a dozen times in my career, built by a man who’d clearly watched someone smarter do it once and thought he understood it. I found money flowing out of the legitimate accounts and into that shell, and from there into Bianca’s apartment, Bianca’s car, Bianca’s jewelry.
