Chapter 2 - What Was on the LaptopI waited until Julian's breathing went slow and even before I slipped out of bed and carried his laptop into the kitchen, my wedding makeup still smudged under my eyes.

I expected to find another woman. Photos, maybe. Messages.

Instead, I found money.

I opened the accounts for his business, braced for the same financial disaster he'd been describing to me for over a year. Instead, the numbers weren't red anymore. They were green — solidly, comfortably green. Three months earlier, two client payments worth six figures apiece had landed in the account.

Before that point, everything matched exactly what Julian had told me. His company really had been drowning.

He'd just never once mentioned that it had come back up for air.

Instead, every two weeks since then, he'd been wiring large sums to the same name.

Delaney.

Fifteen thousand. Then twenty-two thousand. Then eighteen thousand.

All of it routed through an LLC I had never once heard him mention.

I sat there at my own kitchen table, still in my wedding-night pajamas, staring at the screen. Nine years of my savings had gone into keeping his company breathing. Now money was pouring out of that same company toward some other woman, on a schedule regular enough to set a clock by.

I wasn't ready to cry yet. I picked up my phone instead. It was two in the morning.

Delia answered on the second ring. "Wren?"

"I need help," I said, my voice cracking on the last word.

"Talk to me. Right now."

I looked down at the wedding ring still new and unfamiliar on my finger. "Julian's business recovered three months ago, Delia. And ever since, he's been sending money somewhere else. To a woman named Delaney."

A pause. "How much?"

"More than I ever put into saving his company in the first place."

"Wren—"

"I don't know what this is yet. But I need to find out before he realizes I've been in those accounts."

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"I'll be at your office at nine sharp. Don't touch anything else on that laptop tonight. And don't say one single word to him."

After we hung up, I stared at that name on the screen a long time. Delaney. By morning, I intended to know exactly who she was.