Chapter 8 - The Financial Map
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Marisol highlighted a specific, recurring invoice on the table. “Ravel Creative Strategy,” she read aloud. “Is this Bianca’s agency?”
“Yes,” I confirmed, feeling a knot in my stomach. “If you can legally call a rented hot-desk and a basic website template an agency.”
“Your husband personally approved payments to this entity totaling six hundred and forty-two thousand dollars over the last eighteen months.”
I closed my eyes for a second. I knew the number was incredibly large, but hearing it spoken aloud by an attorney made it significantly harder to minimize or ignore.
Marisol turned another page of the ledger. “There are duplicate branding audits, vague event positioning reports, redundant image consultations, extensive private travel reimbursements, undefined hospitality research, and massive monthly vendor retainers. Many of these invoices are completely identical, except for the date changes.”
“She told me she was helping us actively expand into high-end hospitality design,” I said softly.
“She was helping herself to your money, Isla.”
There was more. There always is more when deep betrayal has been allowed to fester and grow behind the polite, smiling facade of a marriage.
Adrian had deliberately routed company funds into highly inflated marketing contracts tied directly to Bianca. Bianca had then transferred large portions of that money to a shadowy holding account controlled entirely by Genevieve.
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Genevieve had subsequently used those specific funds to cover massive, defaulting payments on private loans taken out by Graham Arden, my father-in-law. His quiet, aristocratic dignity now looked significantly less like nobility and much more like crippling financial paralysis.
Worse, several of those desperate loans had been fraudulently secured using projected collateral from assets Adrian did not legally own—specifically including the Toronto condo Genevieve firmly believed I would hand over at Elodie’s wedding.
