Preston’s fingers found the pages after page three, and I watched him read the first line and forget how to breathe. What lay under the divorce filing and the hidden transfers was not about Sabrina at all. It was about the account those transfers had been feeding. For two years he had been quietly moving money out of our shared finances into a private account, and in doing so he had been draining a specific pool of funds. My money. The inheritance from my father, which I had folded into our joint accounts years earlier out of trust, and which Preston had been siphoning off in amounts small enough that a “confused, hurt, begging” wife would never notice.

I had noticed. The laptop that synced to his messages also synced to the banking app he thought was hidden. Page four was the forensic timeline my lawyer’s associate had assembled in a single day, every transfer, every date, every dollar traced from my father’s inheritance into an account registered under only Preston’s name. Page five was worse for him. It was a screenshot of a message to Sabrina where he named the account and joked about the beach house they’d buy with it once the divorce was “handled.” Preston looked up from page five, and the smug cedar-scented confidence was entirely gone. “Marisol,” he said, and his voice cracked. “Let me explain the account.” I told him he could explain it to the person on page six. He turned the page. It was a letter of engagement from a financial crimes attorney.