Chapter 7 - Asset Extraction
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By nine o’clock that morning, I was sitting rigidly in Marisol's sleek office on the thirty-second floor of a downtown tower, holding a paper cup of coffee so bitter it felt almost medicinal.
Marisol Keene was absolutely not the sort of lawyer who wasted her breath on performative outrage. She wore a sharp charcoal suit, thin gold-rimmed glasses, and the focused expression of a skilled surgeon preparing to remove a malignant tumor cleanly.
On the massive glass conference table between us sat the printed, physical contents of my hidden digital file. Seven thick folders. More than four hundred pages of evidence. Three flash drives. A meticulously constructed timeline. A complex financial map. A detailed list of possible civil and criminal charges.
She flipped through the documents with a terrifying, clinical calm.
“This is not simple infidelity, Isla,” Marisol said quietly after twenty minutes of reading.
I looked at her over the rim of my cup. “No?”
“No. The infidelity is just the emotional cover story. This is systematic asset extraction.”
The phrase settled heavily over the room with the freezing, undeniable weight of total accuracy.
My company, Hart House Interiors, had started humbly as a one-woman studio in a tiny rented office above a local florist. Through grueling work, I built it over twelve years into a premier luxury residential design firm. We held lucrative commercial contracts, massive real estate partnerships, and a small but incredibly valuable portfolio of properties held securely through my family trust.
Adrian had joined the company two years after we married. Initially, he came on as a “temporary operations advisor” while he supposedly recovered from a failed tech venture. Then, he was promoted to director of partnerships, primarily because Genevieve had loudly insisted that a husband should not be “made to feel ornamental” in his wife's business.
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I had given him access to the accounts gradually. Too gradually, he had often complained.
Far too generously, I now bitterly understood.
