Chapter 6 - The Council of War
By two o'clock on Saturday afternoon, the kitchen table at Elmwood Avenue looked like the command center for a military operation.
Elena sat on my left, holding a red pen, marking up copy after copy of our joint tax filings from the last three years. Across from us sat Sarah Sterling—a woman of forty-five with sharp gray eyes, cropped silver hair, and a dark blue blazer that looked as if it had been ironed by a navy sergeant.
On the center of the island lay the gold Tag Heuer watch, the damp leather watch box, the Delaware bank statements, and a thumb drive containing four years of Marcus's corporate expense reports that I had backed up from our shared home computer three months ago when he asked me to "fix his PDF converter."
"This is remarkably clean," Sarah said, tapping her pen against the Delaware statements. "Marcus was foolish enough to run his secondary commission checks through an entity registered under his own social security number in a state with transparent corporate registry laws."
"What does that mean for him?" I asked.
"It means," Sarah said with a thin, predatory smile, "that he has been committing both marital fraud and tax evasion. He failed to declare over one hundred and forty thousand dollars in secondary income to the IRS over the last twenty-six months, while simultaneously hiding those assets from the marital estate."
"Will he go to prison?" Elena asked, her eyes gleeful.
"Unlikely for a first offense of this size, unless the DA feels particularly aggressive," Sarah replied. "But he will lose his position at the firm within forty-eight hours of us serving these papers. Financial services firms cannot tolerate partners who maintain undisclosed off-shore or regional slush accounts—it violates their compliance charter with the SEC."
She turned the legal pad toward me.
"Simone, I need to ask you a very direct question," Sarah said, her voice dropping into a solemn, professional register. "Do you want to settle this quietly through mediation, or do you want to destroy his standing in this city?"
I looked down at my hands.
My wedding ring was still on my left ring finger—a simple platinum band with three small channel-set diamonds that Marcus had bought at a pawn shop near the university when we were twenty-four years old. I remembered how proud he had been when he placed it on my finger, how his hands had shaken, how he had promised my father on his deathbed that he would protect me until his last breath.
I reached down, gripped the platinum band, and slowly pulled it off my finger.
The skin underneath was pale, slightly indented from eleven years of constant wear.
I set the ring on top of the Tag Heuer watch box.
"I don't want revenge, Sarah," I said, my voice steady and dark as river water. "Revenge implies that I still care enough about him to want him to suffer. I want my equity back. I want my father's house secured. And I want him stripped of every piece of my life he used to pretend he was a successful man."
May you like
Sarah nodded once, a look of profound respect in her gray eyes.
"Then we go to war," she said, pulling a fresh stack of legal notices from her briefcase. "I'll have the emergency freezing order signed by a judge before the court closes at five."
