Chapter 2 - The Audit Trail
The air inside Villa 4 was thick with the scent of expensive sandalwood and the sudden, suffocating panic of a cornered man.
Vanessa was pacing the travertine tile, her high heels clicking like a countdown clock. “You have to call your lawyer, Ethan. You have to call someone. She’s pregnant, she’s hormonal, she’s—she’s hanging out with Declan Pierce? Do you know what Pierce does? He eats companies for breakfast. If she’s talking to him about your assets—about the firm—”
“Shut up, Vanessa,” Ethan snapped, tossing his phone onto the white linen sofa.
“Don't you dare speak to me like that,” she hissed, spinning around. “I gave up two years of my life playing second fiddle to a wife in the suburbs so you could build this empire. If she takes you to the cleaners, what happens to me? What happens to the promotion you promised me in London?”
Ethan stared at her, really stared at her, as if seeing her through the wrong end of a telescope. Vanessa wasn't a partner in his life; she was an accessory he had bought with surplus vanity, and now the bill was due.
“My firm,” Ethan said slowly, the words tasting like ash, “isn't just my firm. It’s a partnership. My father founded it. Grace’s father poured the seed capital into it thirty years ago.”
Vanessa stopped pacing. The color drained from her face. “Grace’s father?”
“Thomas Vance,” Ethan muttered, rubbing his temples where a sharp, throbbing migraine had taken root. “He kept thirty percent of the voting shares in trust. Grace is the sole beneficiary.”
“And you cheated on her,” Vanessa said, her voice dropping to a flat, horrified whisper. “In a public resort. Where anyone could see.”
“I thought she was in Connecticut,” Ethan muttered defensively. “She said she was spending the weekend with her mother at the estate in Greenwich.”
“Her mother died four years ago, Ethan.”
Ethan froze, his hand dropping from his forehead. The silence in the villa grew heavy, broken only by the steady roar of the Atlantic surf outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.
He hadn't forgotten about Martha Vance. He had just been so accustomed to using Grace's family estate as a convenient excuse for his absences that he had stopped keeping track of the lies. Grace hadn't gone to Greenwich. She hadn't been home.
And she hadn't been crying in the lobby.
Because she hadn't just discovered his affair today.
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She had known about it long before he packed his bags for St. Thomas.
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