Chapter 6 - The Discovery
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I opened the envelope. Inside rested a prepaid burner phone, a set of keys to an untraceable rental car, and a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills.
"I don't need your money, Dad," I whispered, the shame of dependence burning my cheeks.
"It's not my money," my father corrected, sitting across from me. "When you got married, I set up a blind trust in your name. It matured two years ago. I never told Julian about it. It’s entirely yours, and legally untouchable in a divorce proceeding."
Tears pricked my eyes. Even while I pushed him away to protect Julian’s ego, my father had been building a fortress for me in the shadows.
"We have to go on the offensive," my father continued, sliding a sleek, black laptop out of his bag. "Julian’s lawyer is claiming he’s the victim. We need to prove he’s a monster. You lived with him for seven years, Evelyn. What is he hiding?"
I stared at the laptop. Julian was a senior financial analyst for a major logistics firm. He was meticulous, paranoid, and obsessed with appearances.
"He has a safe in his home office," I said slowly. "He told me it was just old tax returns and passports. But he changes the combination every month."
"Do you know the combination?"
"No," I admitted. "But I know his patterns. He uses dates. The day he got promoted. The day his father died. He never uses my birthday, or our son's."
My father opened the laptop and pulled up a highly sophisticated remote access program. "My IT guys at the docks have been monitoring the network traffic from your house since the ambulance arrived. Julian’s computer is still running. If we can remote in, maybe we can find a backdoor to his files."
For three hours, we sat in the quiet safehouse, sipping stale coffee and running brute-force password attacks on Julian's cloud storage. Just before sunrise, the screen flashed green.
I clicked into a hidden, encrypted folder labeled Project Atlas.
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My breath caught in my throat. It wasn't a list of affairs or angry journal entries. It was a massive spreadsheet detailing systemic, multi-million-dollar embezzlement from his own corporate clients, routed through offshore shell companies.
"He isn't just an abuser," my father whispered, staring at the screen. "He's a thief. He's been stealing from the most dangerous people in Chicago."
