Chapter 6 - The Audit Begins
By Wednesday morning, my fever had finally broken, dropping to a safe 37.2 degrees. My lungs still burned when I took a deep breath, and my voice remained a gravelly rasp, but the mental fog of pneumonia had completely lifted. I was sitting up in bed, surrounded by manila folders, highlighters, and three different laptops that Marcus’s paralegal had delivered to my hospital room.
For nine years, my professional reputation had been built on my ability to find hidden money. I had dissected complex corporate tax evasions, tracked offshore shell companies for multi-national conglomerates, and testified as an expert witness in federal court. Digging through Julian’s personal and professional finances was like doing simple preschool math by comparison.
“He really thought he was a criminal mastermind,” I murmured to Marcus, who was leaning against the window sill, drinking coffee and watching me work.
“What did you find?” Marcus asked, coming over to inspect the spreadsheet I had just populated on my screen.
“He’s been skimming from his joint operational accounts for fourteen months,” I explained, pointing a red pen at a recurring series of transfers totaling $4,500 every thirty days. “He set up a fictitious vendor entity called ‘Vance Consulting LLC’ registered to a PO Box in Delaware. He’s been invoicing his own regional sales team for non-existent marketing consultations and diverting the funds into a private checking account.”
“And what was he doing with the money?”
“Funding his lifestyle with Chloe, paying off his mother’s gambling debts at the tribal casino down south, and slowly trying to build a nest egg so he could leave me without taking a lifestyle hit,” I said, my jaw clenching as I traced a $10,000 transfer made the day I was admitted to the hospital. “He actually attempted to withdraw twenty thousand dollars against our home equity line of credit last Tuesday, assuming I was too sick to check the bank notifications.”
“Attempted?” Marcus raised an eyebrow.
“I froze the equity line three weeks ago when I first saw the hotel receipt,” I said coldly. “The bank’s fraud department flagged his signature because I had already submitted a sworn affidavit stating that no borrowing was authorized without my physical, notarized co-signature.”
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Marcus shook his head, a look of genuine awe on his face. “You’re terrifying, Nora. You know that, right? He picked the absolute worst woman in the world to betray.”
“No,” I said, closing the laptop and looking out the hospital window at the grey autumn sky. “He picked the woman who loved him enough to give up her career to nurse his dying sister. He mistook my kindness for stupidity. That is a mistake he will pay for for the rest of his natural life.”
