Chapter 7: Things I Was Not Supposed to Find Out

Anastasia’s POV:

I didn’t sleep a wink.

I lay in the dark after Simone finally drifted off on my couch and I stared at the ceiling and I thought about the folder sitting on my nightstand and the phone call and the fake account and the thirty days and at some point around four in the morning I stopped trying to sleep and made coffee and sat at my kitchen table in the quiet and let myself feel all of it properly for the first time since the parking garage.

Because I had not let myself feel it yet. Not really. I had been too busy processing, cataloguing, planning, moving from one revelation to the next with the focused efficiency of a woman who had learned that falling apart was a luxury with a very specific price tag and she could not afford it right now. But sitting alone in my kitchen at four in the morning with the city still dark outside my window, I finally let the thing I had been holding at arm’s length come all the way in.

Renata had planned it.

Not the affair. The affair had been real and that was its own wound sitting separate and distinct from everything else, the knowledge that while I was cooking Lucas’s favorite meals and attending his mother’s dinners and quietly dismantling my own ambitions to fit inside his life, he had been giving pieces of himself to someone else. That was not Renata’s invention. That belonged to Lucas and I had been carrying it since I read it in Adrian’s folder with the particular stillness of a woman who was not surprised and hated herself a little for not being surprised.

But the pregnancy test. The Tuesday morning. The tissue folded carefully over a stick she had bought with cash from a pharmacy three towns over because she needed me to find it and needed it to look like something she had tried to hide.

She had sat somewhere and planned the worst morning of my life.

Had chosen the day. Had walked into my home the night before with her tablet and her polished smile and her carefully rehearsed competence and had placed it in my guest bathroom trash can knowing exactly what I would do when I found it. Knowing I would sign. Knowing I would leave. Knowing I would not fight because I had never been the kind of woman who stayed somewhere she was not wanted and Renata had studied me long enough to know exactly which lever to pull.

I had walked out of my own marriage on a Tuesday morning because someone decided it was the most efficient way to remove me from an equation I did not even know I was part of.

I wrapped both hands around my coffee mug and breathed.

Then I thought about what Dean had said before he left. That Lucas needed to know. Not everything, not yet, but enough to start protecting himself. And I thought about the access log on my phone with my name attached to an account I had never created. And I thought about Friday and Robert Vane and the Meridian Hotel and everything I was walking into that I still did not fully understand the shape of.

I picked up my phone.

I didn’t call Lucas. I was not ready for that conversation and I was honest enough with myself at four in the morning to admit that not ready was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Some of it was strategy. Most of it was the simple human difficulty of calling the man you were technically still married to and telling him that the worst thing you had assumed about him was true and also somehow worse than you thought and also part of a plan that went considerably beyond the two of you.

Instead I opened the access log screenshot and sent it to Dean with a single message.

She used it again tonight after I got home. Same account. Different files.

His response came back in four minutes which meant he had not slept either.

I know. I’m already on it. Do not access the shared drive again until Friday. She’s watching the account activity.

I stared at that for a long moment.

She was watching the account she had built in my name to see if I would use it. To see if I would touch the files and give her something real to work with. The trap was not just the account. The account was the bait and she was sitting somewhere waiting for me to take it.

I put my phone face down on the table.

Simone appeared in the kitchen doorway at six forty five in last night’s clothes with her natural hair pressed flat on one side and the expression of a woman who had slept for two hours and was running entirely on loyalty and spite.

“There’s coffee,” I said.

She poured herself a cup and sat across from me and looked at my face.

“You didn’t sleep,” she said.

“I thought.”

“Same thing for you.” She wrapped her hands around her mug the way I was wrapping mine and we sat in the quiet for a moment that felt like all the other quiet mornings we had shared over the years, in college dorms and first apartments and the period after my mother died when Simone had simply shown up and stayed until I did not need her to anymore. “How are you actually feeling?”

I thought about it honestly.

“Angry,” I said. “Not the loud kind. The kind that sits very still and waits.”

Simone nodded slowly. “Good. That’s the kind that gets things done.”

“I keep thinking about the morning I found the test,” I said. “And how I stood in that bathroom and I was not even surprised. I thought that meant something was wrong with me. That I had known and stayed anyway which made me stupid or weak or both.” I looked at my coffee. “But I did not know. I just knew something was wrong. I knew the marriage was broken. I did not know someone had broken it deliberately.”

Simone was quiet for a moment.

“Does it change anything?” she said carefully. “Knowing it was planned.”

I thought about Lucas. About the affair that was real regardless of what Renata had built around it. About the neglect and the silence and the three years of being invisible inside my own home. About the man who had sat at a kitchen counter with my signed divorce papers and could not file them and had apparently spent weeks looking for me before deciding that leaving me alone was the kindest thing he could do.

That last part had arrived somewhere in the middle of my sleepless night via a text from Dean who had clearly decided I needed to know it and had sent it at two forty seven in the morning without preamble.

He looked for you for three weeks after you left. Found you outside Celeste’s firm eleven weeks in. Watched you for a while and left without approaching. Said you looked happy. Said he did not want to take that from you.

I had read it four times and felt something complicated move through me that I was still in the process of identifying.

“It changes some things,” I said to Simone. “Not the ones that hurt. But some things.”

She looked at me with the particular patience of a woman who had been my best friend for eleven years and knew exactly when to push and exactly when to let something breathe.

She let it breathe.

My phone buzzed on the table between us.

We both looked at it.

Unknown number. Different from last night. Different area code.

I answered it on the second ring.

“Ms. Voss.” A woman’s voice. Crisp and certain and carrying the specific authority of someone who was accustomed to being listened to immediately. “My name is Patricia Haines. I am a federal investigator with the financial crimes unit. I believe you recently came into possession of some documents relating to Salvatore Enterprises and a company called Vane Capital.”

I did not move.

Simone’s eyes went very wide across the table.

“We have been building a case for fourteen months,” Patricia Haines said. “And we need to talk before you walk into the Meridian Hotel on Friday. Because Robert Vane is not just a corporate predator, Ms. Voss.”

A pause that had the weight of fourteen months inside it.

“He’s the reason three other companies collapsed in the last five years and not a single person connected to those companies ever saw him coming.”

The kitchen was completely silent.

“When can you meet?” I said.