At my husband’s family’s most lavish dinner party, I was forced to pay an absurd bill, and then he told me, “I want a divorce.” An hour later, his desperate calls changed everything.

Gladys hissed into the receiver, telling me that if the ship sank, I would be pulled down into the depths right along with them. It was the final confirmation I needed to know that they didn’t regret the humiliation; they only regretted that I was the only one who could save them.

I watched the green lights of a passing taxi reflect in the puddles and told them very clearly that my attorney would be opening my private file at nine o’clock the next morning. The silence on the other end of the line was heavy with the realization that their leverage had evaporated.

“What file are you talking about?” Conrad whispered, his bravado completely extinguished.

“The one with the duplicate invoices, the offshore wire logs, and the recordings of you telling me to break the law,” I replied before hanging up.

I checked into a small boutique hotel in the Back Bay area that I had scouted weeks ago, knowing that my time in the Whitlock mansion was over. My phone lit up with dozens of missed calls, but the only one I answered was a text from Paul Henderson.