By sunrise, he would understand that the passport in his pocket was worthless, that every account he’d st*len from was already frozen, and that the useless woman he’d dr*gged and abandoned had spent the previous evening doing the one thing she’d trained her whole life to do.
I’d already signed the complaint. I’d already made the call.
The trap he thought he was escaping had closed hours before he ever packed a bag.
PART 2
Before Garrett Payne was my husband, I spent nine years as a federal prosecutor.
White-collar crime. Financial fr*ud, specifically. For nearly a decade, I was the person the government sent after exactly the kind of man I would, years later, accidentally marry — the charming ones, the confident ones, the ones who build their whole lives on the belief that no one is smart enough to catch them because no one ever has.
I was good at it. I was very good at it. I could read a set of financial records the way other people read a face. I knew how money hides, and how it moves, and how the men who move it always, always make the same mistake eventually: they get arrogant, and they leave a trail, and they never once imagine that the quiet person across the table has already followed it all the way to the end.
