Chapter 2 - Thirty Thousand Feet of Truth
Brooke slid into 7B, wedged between us, and it took her all of ten seconds to feel the temperature in that row drop below freezing.
"Is — is everything okay?" she asked, glancing between us.
I fastened my seatbelt with a crisp click. "Everything's fine. I'm Sophie. Derek's wife."
Her head whipped toward him. "Your — your wife?"
Derek opened his mouth. Nothing useful came out. "I told her we were separated," he finally managed, barely above a whisper.
I let out a short laugh with no warmth in it at all. "Funny. Last night he told me he was flying to Denver for a conference."
Brooke's face went white. She looked down at her own ticket — Austin, same flight, same lie wearing a different face. "You told me you'd been living in an apartment in East Hollow for almost a year."
"I can explain—" Derek started.
"He told me practically the same script when I asked about his late nights," I said, almost cheerfully now. "Seems to be his go-to line whenever the story stops holding together."
The plane started rolling toward the runway. Brooke's eyes filled — not sad tears, angry ones, humiliated ones. Derek reached for her hand and she yanked it back like he'd burned her.
I didn't raise my voice. I reached into my bag, pulled out one photograph — the two of them walking out of a hotel in the Uptown district — and set it down on her tray table without a word.
"I didn't get on this plane to scream at you," I told her. "I got on it because I needed to hear the full scope of his lying with my own two ears."
She took a shaky breath. "I had no idea he was still living with you. He swore the divorce paperwork was already drawn up."
Derek's tone flipped instantly, sharp and ugly. "Brooke. Shut up."
That was the moment I watched something break behind her eyes — whatever illusion she'd been holding onto about who Derek was.
"No, you shut up," she snapped back. "You also told me that deposit last month was for our condo!"
I stopped smiling. "What deposit?"
Derek went rigid in his seat like the seatbelt had suddenly tightened on its own.
Brooke, hurt enough now to want blood, didn't hesitate. "A place in the Harbor District. He said he put down twenty-five thousand as earnest money two months ago."
Something cold settled low in my stomach. That money hadn't come from our checking account. It hadn't come from his personal savings either.
That's when I remembered an account I barely looked at anymore — Lily's college trust.
For the rest of the flight, I didn't argue with either of them. I opened my laptop, connected to the in-flight Wi-Fi, and pulled up the wealth management portal.
There it was. A string of small, forgettable withdrawals over six months, ending in a single lump-sum transfer of twenty-five thousand dollars to a real estate escrow account.
Memo line: Family Investment.
I screenshotted everything. Backed it up to a secure drive.
Derek caught the glow of the screen on my face. "Sophie — that's not what it looks like."
"Don't you dare say that sentence to me again," I said, without looking up.
When we landed in Austin, Brooke grabbed her bag and walked off without a backward glance — until right before she vanished into the crowd, when she turned and said, quietly, "I'm sorry. I really didn't know."
Derek trailed after me through the terminal, throwing out excuses like loose change. I walked straight to ground transport, got a cab, and checked into a hotel on the other side of downtown.
That night I got Diane Marsh on a video call — the sharpest forensic family attorney in Portland. I sent her the investigator's file, the flight records, the bank statements.
She reviewed it in real time. Thirty minutes in, her whole expression changed.
"Sophie, don't sign anything he hands you, and do not confront him again tonight," she said. "This is a lot worse than a standard infidelity case."
"What do you mean?"
"That trust requires dual sign-off on anything over five thousand dollars. If you didn't authorize that transfer, your husband committed bank fraud. Digital forgery, too."
Something in me shifted — grief hardening fast into something closer to fury.
"And my assistant just flagged a second transfer we didn't know about," Diane added. "We need a full forensic audit first thing tomorrow."
May you like
I looked out the window. Derek was pacing on the sidewalk across the street, completely in the dark about what I'd just found.
This had stopped being about a broken marriage somewhere over the last hour. Now it was about finding out exactly how far he was willing to go to steal from his own daughter.
