Bank transfers running back four years.
It was damning, and it was only the beginning.
Because the worst of it did not come from the secret family at all.
It came from my own medical file.
Attorney Cardenas moved fast enough to secure my original records before Christian’s team could finish altering them, and what they showed turned my stomach.
For over a year, there had been consultations I never attended, entered under my name.
Diagnoses I had never been given, describing a “fragile,” “anxious,” “unreliable” woman prone to “confusion.” Payments — quiet, regular, off the books — from Christian’s staff to a physician named Dr.
Lawson.
They had not simply planned to sideline me a week before the wedding.
They had been building the paper version of me for a year, a fictional Genevieve on official letterhead, unstable and unwell, so that if the real one ever spoke, the file would speak louder.
My miseries of the last year — the fatigue, the fog, the sense that I was somehow coming apart — had not been in my head.
They had been in a file, put there on purpose, by a man I was going to marry.
Chapter 10 — The Messages
