Chapter 3 - The Price of an Affair
Three days after Marcus accused me of carrying another man's child, my lawyer showed me exactly how much that accusation could be worth to him.
Fourteen million dollars.
Teresa Byrne set our postnuptial agreement on the table between us. I'd called her the moment I learned Marcus's administrator account had deleted the security footage. She arrived before sunrise with coffee, a laptop, and the expression she usually reserved for hostile takeovers.
"Tell me you remember signing this," she said.
"I remember Marcus insisting on it."
The agreement had been drafted two years earlier, shortly after my father died and left me fifty-two percent of Harrow Medical Technologies. Marcus owned eighteen percent; outside investors held the rest. At the time, Marcus said the agreement protected the company if either of us embarrassed the family name. I'd been grieving, handling my father's funeral, trying to keep eight hundred employees from panicking. I signed where he told me to sign.
Teresa turned to page thirty-seven. The clause allowed the "innocent spouse" to purchase the other spouse's shares at their original assessed value if the marriage ended due to proven adultery. My shares had originally been valued at $3.2 million. They were now worth more than $17 million.
"If Marcus convinces a court you cheated," Teresa said, "he could force you to sell your shares for fourteen million less than they're worth."
"And combined with his shares—"
"He'd control seventy percent of the company."
I stared at the agreement. Marcus's accusation had started seconds after Dr. Cole announced the six-week difference. He'd opened his calendar so fast it almost looked rehearsed.
"He didn't ask if the babies were safe," I whispered.
Teresa closed the file. "He asked when they were conceived."
My phone rang. Marcus. Teresa put it on speaker.
"I want you out of the house by Friday," he said.
"It's my house too."
"And I want the invasive paternity testing scheduled."
"No."
"If you refuse, my attorney will document that refusal."
"My doctor says testing both babies could put them at risk."
"If they're mine, you shouldn't be afraid of the results."
Teresa leaned toward the phone. "She's afraid of losing two children because you want evidence for a divorce case."
Marcus went silent. "Who is that?"
"Simone's attorney."
His voice changed instantly. "I'm trying to establish the truth."
"The truth is your account deleted six hours of security footage from the night you claim you weren't home."
"I accessed the system remotely because it sent a false alarm."
"Then why did you delete the footage?"
"I didn't."
"You just admitted accessing it."
Marcus ended the call.
Teresa opened her laptop. "We need to know when he started preparing this." Harrow Medical logged every access to protected company documents, and because the postnuptial agreement involved company shares, a copy sat on our legal server. She contacted our cybersecurity director and requested the audit history.
Someone had opened the agreement three weeks earlier. The user had spent eleven minutes on page thirty-seven — the adultery clause — before downloading a complete copy.
"It wasn't Marcus's account," Teresa said.
"Whose was it?"
May you like
She turned the screen toward me. The name belonged to Bianca Reyes, Marcus's executive assistant. Bianca had traveled with him to Chicago. She'd arranged his flights, his hotel, every meeting on his calendar.
And three weeks before my ultrasound, she'd downloaded the document that could help him take everything my father left me.
