Chapter 5 - The Flight Plan
The kitchen clock ticked softly in the background, muffled by the heavy door between the mudroom and the main house. For a long moment, the only sound was the heavy, uneven rhythm of my own breathing.
“A flight out of the country?” I managed to choke out, the words tasting like ash.
“Private charter,” Sarah confirmed, pulling a folded printout from her coat and handing it to me. “Leaving from a private airstrip sixty miles north of the city. Scheduled for Tuesday morning—less than forty-eight hours from now. He’s liquidating every secondary account, pulling cash advances against our commercial credit lines, and emptying the joint savings we used for the nursery.”
I unfolded the paper. It was a confirmation receipt from an aviation service company under an assumed corporate alias, but the billing address matched Eric’s office credit card.
“He’s running,” I whispered, the final illusion of my marriage shattering into dust. The man I had shared a bed with for four years—the man who was supposed to be the father of my child—wasn't just a cheat or a liar; he was a criminal preparing to abandon us to take the fall for federal crimes he had engineered.
“He thinks he’s untouchable because he believes you’re trapped in the hospital, recovering from early labor, overwhelmed and legally neutralized by that fake prenup,” Sarah said. “He thinks you won't even realize what’s happening until the federal marshals serve the subpoena at your house.”
“Not if we stop him,” I said, a sudden, fierce resolve replacing the numbness in my chest.
Sarah looked surprised. “How? If you go to the police right now with just my word and these unverified printouts, it will take days for a judge to sign off on asset freezes or travel restrictions. By the time they issue a warrant, his private charter will already be in international airspace.”
“Then we don't wait for a judge,” I said, my voice steadying with a cold, absolute clarity. I reached down and picked up my phone from the bench. “We don't need a judge to freeze his accounts if we have the administrative credentials he left active on his home laptop.”
Sarah’s eyes widened slightly. “His home office network is locked down with biometric encryption. You can’t access it without his thumbprint or his master password.”
“I don't need his thumbprint,” I said, remembering the small mahogany box on his dresser where he kept his spare security tokens, and the sticky note he had foolishly kept tucked behind his desk calendar five years ago when we first moved in—the root password he had never bothered to change because he thought nobody would ever dare look. “And I know his master password.”
Before Sarah could answer, the door behind me creaked open. My father stood in the doorway, looking out into the mudroom with a stern, protective frown.
“Claire? Who are you talking to? You shouldn't be standing up in the cold.”
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I turned to my father, holding the printout in my hand, feeling the full weight of the eight months I had spent hiding, shrinking, and trying to keep the peace.
“Dad,” I said, looking him straight in the eyes. “Eric isn't just fighting a divorce. He’s running from the feds, and he set me up to take the blame.”
