Sometimes more.
Vivienne wasn’t just an affair.
That would have been simple.
Marcus found something else buried in his research, almost by accident, while pulling public property filings connected to Vivienne’s name.
She and Nathaniel had quietly formed a shell company eighteen months earlier.
Hale Meridian Holdings.
They’d routed a series of “consulting fees” from three different Cross Realty development projects into it.
Small enough not to trigger internal review.
Large enough, over time, to matter.
I called Vincent the same night I saw the numbers.
“How much?” he asked.
“Almost four hundred thousand dollars, over eighteen months,” I said. “And it’s still moving.”
Vincent was quiet for a moment.
“Your father’s audit clause,” he said slowly. “It’s due this year, isn’t it?”
It was.
My father’s contract entitled me to request a full independent audit of Cross Realty’s books once every two years.
The last one had been requested by my father himself, four years before he died.
The window had reopened the year before.
I’d simply never exercised it.
Too busy, too trusting, too unaware there was anything to look for.
“They know it’s coming,” Vincent said. “If they’re smart, they’re already trying to figure out how to stop you from using it.”
He was right.
I just didn’t know yet how far they’d go.
Part 4: The Clause They Wanted
Three months into my pregnancy investigation, I started noticing the shift in Nathaniel’s family.
I was five months along when Marcus first found the shell company.
Regina, who had never once invited me to lunch alone in four years of marriage, suddenly wanted to “bond, just us girls.”
Nathaniel’s father, Gerald, brought up my father’s old audit clause at a dinner.
Almost casually.
Asking whether I’d “ever thought about simplifying things now that the babies are coming.”
They were testing the water.
Feeling for whether I already knew something.
Or whether they still had time to move me out of the way quietly.
I gave them nothing.
I smiled.
I said I hadn’t thought about it.
