Chapter 4
Thirty minutes after that, he showed up at my corporate office building, but security refused to let him past the lobby. He then sent a frantic text message asking, “Are you really going to throw away seven years of marriage over one single argument?”
I stared at the glowing screen for a long time before typing my final reply. I wrote, “Those seven years are already dead and gone, Brandon. Right now, I am deciding what I am going to do with the next forty years of my life.”
His legal team tried to spin a completely absurd narrative during the initial proceedings. They claimed that I had abandoned the marriage on a whim, that my mother was a toxic influence who interfered in our relationship, that all financial transfers to his family were mutually agreed upon, and that the physical assault was merely a mutual struggle during a heated argument.
When Claire read his legal response out loud, she burst into sarcastic laughter. She pointed to the official medical documentation and police photos sitting on the desk.
She said, “A mutual struggle? It is amazing how people lie on paper when they forget we have undeniable physical evidence and police reports.”
Meanwhile, our forensic accountant began digging through years of complex financial records to locate where our money had vanished. What he uncovered was a massive fraud scheme.
Brandon would wire forty thousand dollars to his brother Lucas, and a few days later, thirty-five thousand dollars would be transferred from Lucas into a completely separate, unlisted account. Brandon was systematically draining our shared marital accounts and hiding the money in a private account under his sole name.
He had managed to secret away over two hundred thousand dollars long before he ever hit my mother, long before she refused his loan request, and long before I ever entertained the thought of a divorce.
During a formal deposition, his attorney attempted to justify the hidden funds by claiming Brandon was simply protecting assets from unreasonable external expenses.
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Claire leaned forward and asked firmly, “Protecting assets from whom exactly?”
Brandon looked at me across the conference table and blurted out, “From her family’s endless financial demands!”
