“I checked the property records.”
She pushed them toward me.
The house wasn’t owned the way Daniel had described.
There were debts attached to it.
Large ones.
“Why would he lie to you?”
Chloe looked down.
“I don’t know.”
I looked at her.
“Maybe because he lied to everyone.”
She swallowed.
Then she told me something that made my stomach turn.
Daniel had asked her to sign several financial documents after they moved in together.
He told her they were routine.
She hadn’t read them carefully.
“Three days ago, I asked him about one of them,” she said.
“And?”
“He became furious.”
“Then what happened?”
“He grabbed my laptop.”
I stared at her.
“He deleted files.”
That was when we realized something.
This wasn’t simply a story about a man leaving his wife for a younger woman.
Daniel had been constructing something behind both our backs.
And whatever he had been building, he was now desperate to protect it.
That evening, I went back through the folder.
I found one document I’d overlooked.
It was a property transfer.
The date was eighteen months before my divorce.
The signature at the bottom was supposedly mine.
I stared at it.
Then I whispered the words I had been afraid to say.
