Chapter 5 - The Midnight Ledger
The phone continued to buzz against the wooden grain of the coffee table, a rhythmic, vibrating pulse that seemed to mock every year of the marriage I thought I knew.
David looked frantically from the screen to me, his hands trembling slightly. “Should I... should I answer it?”
“Put it on speaker,” Patrice said instantly, stepping forward with her phone already recording the audio feed.
David swallowed hard, tapped the green accept icon, and pressed the speaker button.
“David,” Dale’s voice came through the tiny speaker, hard and stripped of all its usual warmth. “I know Carol is there. Don't let her fill your head with nonsense. She’s weaponizing a lawyer who doesn't know the first thing about our corporate structure.”
“Dale, you lied to me,” David stammered, his defensive instincts kicking in. “You told me Carol knew about the asset split. You didn't tell me you were dumping company debt onto her personal social security number!”
A cold, heavy silence hung over the living room for three agonizing seconds. When Dale finally spoke, the smooth charm was completely gone, replaced by a chilling pragmatism.
“If she wants a war, she can have a war,” Dale said smoothly. “But tell her that if she files that injunction tomorrow morning, the first thing I do is burn Vance Holdings to the ground. Diane has already agreed to liquidate the Macon accounts. By noon tomorrow, there won't be four hundred thousand dollars left to fight over. There won't be anything left for either of us.”
Patrice’s eyes locked onto mine. She didn't hesitate; she reached out and muted David’s phone before he could reply, shaking her head sharply.
“He’s bluffing,” Patrice whispered fiercely. “If he liquidates corporate accounts while an injunction is pending, he’s looking at federal fraud charges, not just civil divorce court.”
“He’s not bluffing,” I said, looking down at David’s coffee table where a secondary stack of papers sat half-hidden beneath a magazine. I reached out and pulled the magazine away, revealing an overnight courier receipt dated yesterday afternoon.
The sender wasn't Dale.
It was Diane Vance.
May you like
And the destination address wasn't Macon, or Atlanta, or even the lakehouse.
It was a Swiss bank routing number associated with an international holding entity registered under a completely different name—a name that belonged to someone neither Patrice, nor Miller, nor I had ever suspected.
