Chapter 4 - The AuditThe conference room of Vance & Associates smelled of old paper, leather furniture, and expensive espresso.
It was Friday morning, exactly two weeks after the confrontation at Margaret’s dining table. I sat across the polished oak desk from Marcus Vance, a formidable attorney with silver hair and a reputation for dismantling white-collar philanderers with surgical precision.
Sitting beside me was Margaret, reviewing a thick, bound financial audit report with the intensity of a Wall Street short-seller.
“Well,” Marcus said, closing a spreadsheet with a soft tap. “The forensic accounting team finished digging through the offshore LLC Daniel set up under a dummy corporate identity. It’s worse than we thought.”
My stomach tightened. “How much worse?”
Marcus slid a single summary page across the table. My eyes scanned the bold red numbers at the bottom line.
Over one hundred and twenty thousand dollars had been systematically drained from our joint savings, my personal inheritance account, and our home equity line over the past fourteen months. Most of it hadn't just gone toward dinners and jewelry for Vanessa; it had been pumped into a speculative cryptocurrency wallet and high-risk options trading accounts that Daniel had managed in secret, trying to play day-trader with our future to impress his mistress with fabricated wealth.
“He lost sixty thousand of it in a bad crypto play last November,” Margaret murmured, her voice dangerously quiet. She didn't look angry; she looked like a surgeon inspecting a rotting tumor. “Right around the time he was complaining that we needed to cut back on our holiday travel budget.”
“Can we recover it?” I asked, looking up at Marcus.
“Every single cent,” Marcus replied with a confident smirk. “Between the court-ordered asset freeze we secured yesterday, the fraudulent transfer documentation showing he used marital funds to support an illicit paramour, and Robert’s testimony regarding the corporate embezzlement from the firm, Daniel is facing not just a devastating divorce settlement, but potential criminal charges for wire fraud and forgery.”
I sat back in my chair, letting out a long, slow breath. The knot of anxiety that had lived in my chest since the day I saw him holding Vanessa’s hand at the mall finally began to untangle.
“What does he want right now?” I asked.
“A settlement conference,” Marcus said, tossing a formal letter from Daniel’s new, desperate public defender onto the desk. “He wants mediation. He wants to keep his car, his golf club membership, and a lump sum payout to help him get back on his feet.”
Margaret let out a sharp, dry laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across pavement.
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“A lump sum,” she repeated, adjusting her pearl earrings. “Tell him we will give him exactly one thousand dollars in cash, a bus ticket out of Cook County, and not one single second more of our time. If he doesn't sign the uncontested fault-based divorce papers by Monday morning at 9:00 a.m., Robert will hand the criminal fraud packet directly to the United States Attorney’s office.”
Marcus raised an eyebrow, clearly impressed by her ruthlessness. “Consider it done, Mrs. Bennett.”
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