“Then do your job. Afterward, come to my office.”
I spent the next forty-five minutes stitching up an artery in a man who had been stabbed outside a bar. My hands didn’t shake. My colleagues told me I looked calm, and that almost made me laugh. Inside, something colder than rage had taken hold of me. The pain would come later. The humiliation, too. But in that moment, it was pure technique.
After my shift, I met with Rebecca, who had a folder full of screenshots, statements, and tax returns from the past three years, pulled from our shared cloud drive. She explained what I could document right away: marital funds, possible infidelity, deceptive financial behavior, and misappropriation of shared assets. Then she asked me the question that tightened my chest.
“Do you know who that woman is?”
I didn’t. Not yet.
But by nightfall, I did.
Her name was Lauren Mercer. Twenty-nine years old. Former pharmaceutical sales representative. Ethan had been paying the rent on a downtown apartment through an LLC that I assumed was linked to one of his suppliers. Rebecca’s investigator found the lease, utility bills, and social media photos that Lauren had kept almost entirely private, except for one tagged image from seven months earlier. Ethan’s hand rested on her pregnant belly.
The caption read: Building our little future.
Our little future.
