Chapter 5: The Life He Built Before Mine
I didn't sleep.
My mother had taken Donovan to one of the upstairs rooms around nine.
She'd paused at the bottom of the staircase and looked back at me, sitting at the long dining table with my laptop open and Renata's fourteen pages spread across the screen.
"Come up when you're ready," she said.
"I will."
She didn't push.
She never did.
I read every page twice.
Then I made a list.
Then I read them a third time.
The invoices were real.
The amounts were specific.
Fourteen months of transfers, each one just small enough to avoid triggering a review — $3,200 here, $4,800 there, always attached to a vendor name that looked legitimate until you searched for it and found nothing.
No website.
No registered business.
No address that matched anything real.
The vendor name on eleven of the fourteen invoices was the same: *MSR Consulting Group.*
I searched it.
No Arizona registration.
No federal tax ID that matched.
One result came back — a dissolved LLC, registered in Nevada, listed owner: *D.
Merritt.*
Diane Merritt.
His mother.
I sat back in my chair.
He had been funneling money to his mother through fake vendor invoices.
For over a year.
From a company that trusted him.
Using a name he had never told me he had.
I picked up my phone and called the one person I knew who could tell me what I was looking at.
Marcus picked up on the second ring.
He was my corporate attorney — had been since I'd closed my first major contract five years ago.
"Taylor.
It's late."
"I know.
I need you to run a name for me.
Full legal search.
Tonight if you can."
A pause.
"What name?"
"Caden Merritt-Shaw.
Possible residence in Scottsdale.
Possible connection to a dissolved Nevada LLC called MSR Consulting Group."
Silence on the line.
"Taylor.
Is this about your husband?"
"Yes."
Another pause.
Longer this time.
"Give me an hour," Marcus said.
He called back in forty minutes.
"There's a property in Scottsdale," he said.
"Registered to Caden Merritt-Shaw and Diane Merritt, joint tenancy.
Purchased nine years ago."
Nine years ago.
We had been married for seven.
"Is there anything else on the name?" I asked.
"A marriage record," Marcus said carefully.
"Maricopa County.
Eight years ago."
My hand tightened on the phone.
"To whom?"
"A woman named Sasha Vidal.
The record shows no divorce filing in Arizona." A pause.
"Taylor, I have to ask you directly.
When did you and Caden marry?"
"Seven years ago," I said.
"Pima County."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
"I'll have a full report to you by morning," Marcus said.
"Don't confront him tonight.
Not until we know the full picture."
I set the phone down on the table.
Seven years of marriage.
Six years of building a life.
Four years of a second phone.
And somewhere in Scottsdale, a woman named Sasha Vidal who had never been divorced from my husband.
Donovan's laugh drifted down from upstairs — he'd woken briefly, and I could hear my mother's soft voice settling him back to sleep.
I closed the laptop.
Tomorrow I would need to be very careful.
Very calm.
And very ready.
May you like
Because Caden would be back at that gate in the morning.
And this time, I intended to open it.
