Naomi turned to the next folder, and the thing kept getting larger, the way rot does once you open the wall.
Rothwell Global had also financed part of the luxury renovations on the home where Damon and Sloane were now living together — the home he had described to me, months earlier, on a cold divorce video call, as belonging entirely to Sloane’s family.
And the registered managing director of Rothwell Global Enterprises, the man whose signature sat at the bottom of the company that had drained my grandmother’s trust, was Everett Rothwell.
Damon’s older brother.
I sat there in my hospital bed and felt the last of my understanding rearrange itself.
For eight months I had believed that my marriage had ended over an affair — that Damon had simply wanted a younger woman and a fresh start, and that the cruelty was personal, emotional, the ordinary ugliness of a man leaving.
It had never been only that.
The affair was real, but it was also cover.
While I grieved a husband who had traded me for his assistant, that husband and his brother and, I would soon learn, his mother had been quietly emptying the estate my grandmother spent her life building.
I had thought I was the victim of a broken heart.
I was the victim of a family business.
And once I understood that, a great many small things I had never been able to explain clicked into place at once, the way the last few pieces of a puzzle suddenly reveal the picture.
The strange urgency Damon had shown about keeping the divorce quick and quiet — I had read it as a man eager to be rid of me, and it was that, but it was also a man racing a clock, needing the settlement finalized before anyone thought to look too hard at the accounts.
The way he had discouraged me, gently, from involving my grandmother’s old estate lawyer, suggesting we keep things “simple” and “friendly” — I had taken it as consideration, and it had been concealment.
Even the timing of the affair itself, its sudden carelessness near the end, the photograph sent to the wrong number: I wondered, afterward, whether some part of it had been almost deliberate, a controlled demolition, a scandal offered up to occupy me so thoroughly with my own heartbreak that I would never think to audit the books.
A betrayed wife looks at her marriage.
She does not look at her ledgers.
Damon had understood that about grief, the way he understood everything about me after years of study, and he had used it.
The affair was not only his appetite.
It was, in its way, a magician’s flourish — the bright, painful thing in the one hand, waved about to keep my eyes off the quiet, patient work of the other.
I had spent eight months mourning the wrong crime.
Chapter 10 — Amalia’s Legacy
