Chapter 2 - THE PROFESSIONAL AUDIT
I arrived at North Valley Insurance thirty minutes early,
the parking lot empty and gray under the morning mist.
I sat at my desk,
the familiar scent of coffee and old paper surrounding me,
and opened my private laptop.
I didn't use the company network,
I knew better than to leave a digital trail that Thomas might find.
I started with Evergreen Mechanical Holdings LLC,
the name I had found in the manila folder.
It was registered in Nevada,
a state known for its privacy laws and lack of corporate income tax.
The filing date was six months ago,
the same week Thomas told me he needed to refinance the house for "business expansion."
I remembered the papers he had brought home,
the way he had laid them out on the kitchen table,
pointing to the spots where I needed to sign.
“Just standard stuff, Sue,”
he had said,
kissing my neck.
“It’ll help us get that new fleet of trucks.”
I had signed them without looking,
trusting him with the same ease I used to breathe.
Now,
I searched for Patricia Vance.
Her website was polished,
minimalist,
and full of buzzwords like "asset protection" and "seamless transitions."
There was no photo of her,
only a silhouette against a mountain range.
But I remembered the voice from the bedroom,
brisk,
professional,
and entirely without soul.
I pulled up our joint bank statements,
the ones the bank had sent to my private email.
I saw the transfers,
small at first,
then larger,
moving into an account labeled "E.M.H."
Evergreen Mechanical Holdings.
My equity,
my savings,
the money we had set aside for a retirement that would never happen.
It was being drained away,
siphoned into a Nevada desert.
I felt a wave of nausea,
a physical reaction to the theft of my future.
I spent the next four hours building a spreadsheet,
tracking every dollar that had left our lives.
By noon,
I had a total.
Four hundred and eighty thousand dollars.
It was almost everything we owned.
I leaned back in my chair,
staring at the numbers on the screen.
Thomas hadn't just cheated,
he had committed a slow-motion robbery.
He was waiting for the "final authorization,"
the paper he said I would sign by the end of the week.
I knew what it was before I even saw it.
The sale of the house.
The cedar-sided home we had lived in for eighteen years.
He was going to sell the roof over my head and fly to Belize with the proceeds.
I closed my eyes,
thinking of the red maple tree in the backyard.
May you like
I wasn't going to let him take it.
I wasn't going to let him take anything else.
