PART 4 — RAISA TEAGUE
I did not go back to Fenwick Row that night. I checked into a hotel by the ring road with the clothes I had on and I sat on the end of that bed until about four in the morning with my phone in front of me.
I did not ring him. He rang me eleven times between ten and midnight and then stopped, and I have thought since about what stopping at midnight tells you.
On the Monday I took the morning off and sat in the office of a family attorney named Raisa Teague, who is forty-eight, and I put my phone on her desk and turned the photographs around one at a time.
She looked at them for about six minutes.
Then she said, “Mrs. Vasko, do you understand what you have?”
I said I understood the numbers.
And she said, “The numbers are the second thing.”
The first thing, she said, was the letter.
Because the entire structure of what he had built rested on one representation — that he was an unemployed man with no assets and no income — and that representation was false, and he had it in writing, in his own hand, on his own table, in a file with a resignation letter behind it.
She said, “Do not tell him you have seen any of it. Do not go back to that apartment. Do not touch anything.”
Then she gave me a piece of advice that I would put in front of any woman in my position, and it is not the exciting one.
She said, “Go to work tomorrow and behave normally, and get me your last three years of bank records this week, and do not have one single conversation with him about money.”
It took nine months.
Those nine months are the part that never makes it into a story like this, and I am going to put some of it in.
I went to work every day. Raisa was specific about that and she was right. I closed a year-end at Tessler in the February with an eleven-day audit on top of it and I did not tell one person in that building what was happening in my life until it was over.
I lived out of the hotel for six days and then I went home, because it is my apartment and Raisa got the interim order on the Thursday, and I slept badly in my own bed for about four months.
He came for his things twice with his cousin and I was not there either time, by arrangement, and both times I walked into a flat that had been gone through — not damaged, gone through, drawers left open a half inch, which is a thing I noticed and mentioned once to Raisa and which she told me to write down and stop thinking about.
The legal costs were nineteen thousand dollars.
I want that number in here. Nineteen thousand dollars to establish that a man who had lived in my home for three years had spent eight months running a business in his mother’s name. The equalisation payment did not cover it.
And there was one Sunday in the June, about two-thirds of the way through, when I sat on my own kitchen floor and seriously considered dropping all of it and signing whatever he wanted, because I had reached the point where the money had stopped meaning anything and I simply wanted the thing to be over.
I rang my sister and did not tell her why I was ringing and we talked for an hour about her kitchen extension.
Then on the Monday I went back to work.
Here is roughly how the rest of it went, without the parts Raisa would not want written down.
The photographs got us a preservation order and then discovery, and discovery got us the platform account, which was in Ilma’s name but which had been accessed for eight months from an IP address that resolves to my apartment on Fenwick Row.
That is the detail I did not see coming and the one that mattered most.
He ran that business off my internet. Eight months of it. The seller account’s login history is a list of my own address.
Which meant, as Raisa put it in a letter that I have read perhaps thirty times, that the operation had been conducted from the marital residence throughout, and that the beneficial ownership of a business registered in his mother’s name was going to be a matter for the court rather than a matter of paperwork.
Ilma was joined to the proceedings in the February.
She sat in a room in the March and answered questions about a company she is the sole member of, and it took about eleven minutes for it to become clear that she could not name a single supplier.
Wade’s own numbers on that whiteboard were used against him, because he had written them himself, and because I had photographed them at twenty-five past eight in the evening in a room I had been given the keys to and told to clean.
Raisa asked me once whether I felt any way about that. About having been handed the keys.
I said the only thing I have ever felt about it, which is that he gave them to me in front of twenty people in order to break me, and that I have never once had to defend how I got in.
