Chapter 5 - The Missing Asset
The ambulance crew arrived ten minutes later, patching up my split lip and wrapping my badly sprained shoulder in a tight stabilizing sling. By the time they cleared me and left, it was nearly 3:00 AM.
The house was dead silent. Officer Jensen and her partner had stayed until the locks were changed and a temporary safety detail was noted in the precinct database, but eventually, they had to return to patrol, leaving me alone in the dark.
I sat on the edge of the master bed in the dark, rocking Noah in the quiet hum of the nursery monitor.
My phone—still clutched tightly in my hand—flashed with a notification. An email alert from our joint banking app.
Curious, and driven by a sudden, icy intuition, I unlocked the screen and opened the application.
My breath hitched.
The primary checking account—the one where we had saved every penny of our combined income for the last five years, the account containing the deposit for Noah’s nursery and our emergency savings—was sitting at a balance of zero dollars and fourteen cents.
I tapped over to our savings portfolio.
Access Denied.
An automated message popped up: This account has been frozen or transferred by primary account holder.
My blood ran completely cold.
Caleb hadn't just taken my keys. Before he ever woke up, before he dragged me down the hall, before the police were ever called, he had anticipated this. Or worse—he had planned it.
He had systematically stripped our finances clean, locking me out of every single digital asset we owned, leaving a new mother with a three-day-old baby, a bruised body, and literally zero dollars to her name in an empty house.
My phone buzzed in my hand. A text message from an unknown number.
I opened it.
A single photo attached.
It was a picture of my car—the sedan parked in the driveway—sitting outside a luxury downtown hotel parking garage, with a caption underneath: Good luck surviving on your own, Elena. You’ll be begging to come back by noon tomorrow.
I stared at the screen, the temporary relief of his arrest instantly evaporating into a suffocating wave of panic.
I didn't just have to fight for custody. I didn't just have to heal from my injuries.
I was completely, utterly broke, trapped in a house he legally owned, with a bank account he had just emptied into the dark.
I reached for the landline on the nightstand to call Marcus Vance, the family law attorney whose card a nurse had secretly slipped into my diaper bag at the hospital. My fingers shook so badly I dropped the receiver twice before managing to dial the first digit.
May you like
On the third ring, a gruff, exhausted voice answered on the other end.
“Vance Law Offices. This is an emergency line. State your name and your situation.”
