Chapter 2 - The Ghost in the Ledger
I didn't go back to our house that night.
I stayed in my childhood bedroom, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
Twelve years of my life had been a lie.
I was an accountant for a top-tier firm.
I was trained to spot discrepancies in millions of dollars of data.
How had I missed the discrepancy in my own husband's heart?
At 4:00 AM, I opened my laptop.
I began to dig.
I didn't start with our joint accounts.
I started with "Apex Horizon Assets."
Damian thought he was clever.
He thought he had buried the ownership behind three layers of shell companies.
But shell companies are like puzzles.
If you find the right corner piece, the whole image reveals itself.
I spent four hours tracing wire transfers through the Cayman Islands and Delaware.
Then, I found the signature.
The company wasn't just Damian's.
It was owned by a woman named Sarah Jenkins.
My stomach turned.
Sarah Jenkins was Damian’s "sister" who lived in Seattle.
Or so he had told me for twelve years.
I pulled up the social security records for Sarah Jenkins.
She wasn't his sister.
She was his first wife.
A wife he had never divorced.
The air in the room felt thin.
Our marriage wasn't just a lie; it was a crime. Bigamy.
Every document we had signed together was potentially void.
But why my father's house?
It wasn't worth millions.
It was a standard three-bedroom home in a middle-class neighborhood.
I looked at the property history.
Damian had been trying to get this specific plot of land for a long time.
He hadn't just married me for the "strategy."
He had married me to get close to Walter Campbell.
I checked the geological surveys of the neighborhood.
Nothing unusual. No oil. No rare minerals.
Then I found an old newspaper clipping from 1954.
It was an article about my grandfather, a man who had been a jeweler in the city.
The article was titled: "The Mystery of the Vanished Vault."
My grandfather had died shortly after the article was written.
He had left the house to my father, but he had died without a penny to his name.
People said he had hidden his inventory before he passed away.
Inventory worth millions in unmounted diamonds.
Damian didn't want the house.
He wanted what was under it.
I looked at the voice recorder on the desk.
I realized that Damian Ross was much more dangerous than a car salesman.
He was a treasure hunter who had been digging into my family for a decade.
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And he was about to hit pay dirt.
***
