“Because if he’s hiding assets, he knows exactly what he’s doing. People like this rarely make one mistake.”
I swallowed.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the money you found might only be the beginning.”
Those words stayed with me.
The beginning.
Not the end.
After I hung up, I continued searching.
Not because I wanted to invade Joshua’s privacy.
Because I finally understood something.
For fourteen years, I had trusted him with every financial decision in our marriage.
The mortgage.
The investments.
The retirement accounts.
Everything.
And he used that trust as a blindfold.
I opened the old tax folders in the basement.
The ones Joshua never touched because he always said paperwork was “my department.”
A strange thing happened as I went through them.
I started seeing patterns.
Small things I had ignored.
A sudden increase in withdrawals.
Payments labeled as consulting fees.
Large transfers that disappeared into accounts I had never heard of.
Then I found something that made my hands go cold.
A company name.
