Chapter 2 - What Phoebe FoundBy the time the nurses moved me to recovery, holding my daughter — I had already decided to name her Josephine, after my grandmother, regardless of whose surname she carried — Phoebe had done exactly what I asked.
The first thing: freeze every discretionary account Desmond could access without dual authorization. The Ashworth Family Trust, which I had structured eleven years earlier when Desmond and I were still building the company from a shared studio apartment and a line of credit backed by my name, not his, required two signatures for any transfer above $50,000. Mine was one of them. It had always been one of them. Desmond had simply never bothered to notice, because for eleven years, I had never given him a reason to.
The second thing: pull every document connecting Priya Anand to Ashworth Holdings. Employment records. Termination date. Severance package. Any consulting contracts issued after her "internship" technically ended, which — Phoebe discovered within four hours — it never formally had. Priya had been on the payroll, quietly, for nineteen months, under a line item labeled "Special Projects Consulting."
The third thing: locate the paperwork for the child. Birth certificate. Any acknowledgment of paternity Desmond might have already signed. Any transfers made toward this other child's care.
By morning, before Desmond had even returned to the hospital, Phoebe called back.
"Mabel, you need to sit down. Actually — you're already sitting down. Good."
"Tell me."
"He's been paying for an apartment in Tribeca under a shell LLC for the past two years. Rent, utilities, a car lease. All routed through Special Projects Consulting. And Mabel—" She paused. "The birth certificate lists the child's last name as Ashworth. Filed eleven months ago. He never told you. He never told the board. And he definitely never told you that under our own trust documents, any child formally acknowledged as an Ashworth heir triggers a mandatory disclosure to co-trustees within thirty days."
"He never disclosed it."
"No," Phoebe said. "Which means he's been in breach of trust for eleven months. And that, Mabel, is not a marital problem anymore. That's a fiduciary one."
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I looked down at Josephine, asleep against my chest, her small fist curled against my hospital gown.
"Good," I said. "Then let's handle it as one."
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