I paid cash for the coffee. Cash for everything now, actually. No card statement was going to tell Palmer where I'd been.

The shop was three blocks from a subway stop he never used—wrong line, wrong direction from his office. I picked a table in the back, facing the door, the way I imagined people did in movies. My hands wrapped around a mug I didn't really want.

Regina Torres showed up eleven minutes late, apologized for none of it, and sat down like she'd been coming to this table her whole life.

"You said cameras." She didn't touch her coffee. "Show me."

I slid my phone across the table. She watched the clip of Gloria gripping Owen's arm without blinking. Watched Palmer smirk in the background. Handed the phone back.

"This is good for custody," she said. "It's ugly, it's on video, a judge will hate him for it. But it won't touch the money."

"The money."

"Divorce isn't won on cruelty, Aleyna. It's won on paper." She finally picked up her cup, took a sip, made a face like she regretted it. "I need account statements. Transfer histories. Anything with his name on it that moves in a pattern. If he's hiding assets—and men like this usually are—we need to see the shape of it before he sees us coming."

I thought about the filing cabinet in our home office. The one Palmer never touched because he called paperwork "my thing." I'd built our filing system myself, years ago, back when I still believed organizing our life together meant something.

"I can get that," I said.

Regina studied me for a second too long. "You already knew where to look. Didn't you."

I didn't answer. I didn't have to.

---

It started with a feeling. Small, easy to ignore. A withdrawal here, a transfer there. Numbers that didn't line up the way they used to when I did the books for both of us, back before Palmer insisted he'd "handle his own accounts, babe, you don't need the headache."

I'd let that headache go. Now I wanted it back.

The first evening, Palmer texted that he was working late. I didn't ask on what. I waited twenty minutes after Owen fell asleep, then went into the office and closed the door.

The filing cabinet stuck on the second drawer, same as always. Inside: folders labeled in my own handwriting from three years ago. Bank statements. Credit card summaries. Investment account printouts Palmer had asked me to file and then forgotten existed.

I photographed every page. Slow, careful, flash off so it wouldn't bounce light under the door. My phone screen glowed too bright in the dark room, and every time the house creaked, I froze like a rabbit.

Nothing. Just the radiator.

Second evening, I found it.

A transfer, four thousand dollars, to something called Meridian Capital Holdings LLC. Then another. Six thousand, two weeks later. Then eight. The transfers didn't have a rhythm exactly, but they had a shape—little spikes that always landed a few days before Palmer left on one of his "business trips."

I pulled up my old calendar, the one where I still tracked his travel because some habit in me needed to know when he'd be home for Owen's pickup. March fourteenth, Chicago. March eleventh, a four-thousand-dollar transfer. April second, Boston. March thirtieth, six thousand.

My stomach turned over slow, like something rotting.

Third evening, I found the cash advances. Five of them in four months, each one a few hundred short of triggering a bank alert. Each one from an ATM inside a casino I didn't recognize the name of until I looked it up and found a five-star review calling it "the best high-stakes room outside Atlantic City."

I sat on the office floor with my back against the cabinet and the photos glowing on my phone screen, and I laughed. One short, ugly laugh with no air behind it.

He wasn't taking business trips. He was gambling. And an LLC I'd never heard of was swallowing our money in bites just small enough to not look hungry.

I didn't cry. I'd stopped expecting myself to.

I photographed the ATM receipts, the LLC transfer confirmations, the investment summary showing a balance that had quietly dropped by six figures over eighteen months while Palmer told me our savings were "solid, babe, don't worry about it."

By the fourth evening, I had a folder with two hundred and eleven photos. I organized them the way I used to organize spreadsheets at my old job—by date, then by category, then by amount, largest to smallest. Old habits. Good ones, it turned out.

I met Regina again on a Thursday, same coffee shop, same back table. I handed her a flash drive instead of my phone this time.

She scrolled through the first twenty photos in silence. Her eyebrows didn't move, but her mouth flattened into something close to a smile.

"Meridian Capital Holdings," she said. "You know what that is?"

"I have a guess."

"It's a shell. I'd bet money on it—no pun intended." She closed the folder, looked up at me. "This is a debt trail, Aleyna. A big, ugly one. If he's been feeding a habit this size, he's not just broke. He's desperate."

"Good," I said, and meant it.

Regina slid the drive into her bag. "Desperate men make mistakes. Keep watching him. Keep the cameras running. And keep pulling every paper you can find—because whatever he's hiding, he's going to need a lot more money to hide it, and soon."

I nodded, and outside the window, a train rattled past on the line Palmer never took, and I thought: *soon* sounded exactly right.

Palmer brought me coffee on Wednesday morning. Just showed up at my side of the bed with it, already made the way I liked it—oat milk, one sugar—and sat on the edge of the mattress like he used to when we were still dating.

"I've been distracted lately," he said. "I know that. I want to make it up to you."

I took the mug. Blew on it. Didn't answer right away, because I'd learned that silence made him talk more, and talking more meant mistakes.

"There's a thing Friday," he said. "Company party. Rooftop bar downtown. I want you there. On my arm. Showing everyone what I've got."

"What you've got," I repeated.

He smiled, and it almost reached his eyes. "My wife."

I smiled back. "I'd love that."

That night I lay awake cataloguing the last three days—the coffee, the compliment about my hair on Tuesday, the way he'd told a waiter at dinner to "take good care of her, she's the best thing that ever happened to me." None of it felt like love. It felt like staging. Like someone dressing a set before the cameras rolled.

I didn't tell Regina about the party. Not yet. I just started paying closer attention to my own drinks.

---

The rooftop was all string lights and cold wind coming off the Hudson, waiters gliding through with trays of champagne that caught the light like something breakable. Palmer had his hand at the small of my back the second we stepped out of the elevator, guiding me toward a cluster of men in expensive jackets.

"Aleyna, this is Iris," he said. "Old friend from college. She just started consulting for the firm."

Iris Gomez turned toward me with a laugh already forming on her mouth, like she'd rehearsed the exact moment of it.

"Oh, I've heard so much about you," she said, and put her hand out. Warm. Soft. Her nails were the same shade of red as her lipstick. "Palmer talks about Owen constantly. You must be exhausted keeping up with that boy's energy."

"He keeps me young," I said.

Her laugh again, bright and easy, and her hand found Palmer's forearm—not a touch that asked permission, but one that assumed it. She left it there a beat too long. Long enough to say something her mouth never would.

I kept smiling. I filed it away. The hand. The laugh, timed a half-second before anything was actually funny. The way her eyes moved over me once, quick and clinical, like she was pricing furniture.

"You two go way back," I said lightly.

"Junior year," Iris said. "He was different then. Softer." Her eyes flicked to Palmer, and something passed between them, small and private, a door opening just wide enough for me to see the room behind it before it shut again.

"People change," I said.

"Some do," Iris agreed, and smiled at me like we were sharing a secret. I smiled back like I didn't know exactly which secret she meant.

A colleague of Palmer's pulled me aside a few minutes later—something about a golf trip, a wife who wanted advice on a caterer—and I let myself be drawn a few steps across the terrace, angled just enough that I could still see my champagne glass sitting on the little round table where I'd left it.

I watched from the corner of my eye. Palmer leaned toward Iris. Her hand went to her clutch. Something passed between their fingers, quick, practiced. Palmer's hand hovered near my glass for less than two seconds.

I kept talking about caterers.

When I came back, I picked up my glass and studied it under the string lights. There—right at the bottom, a faint cloudiness that hadn't been there before, like sugar that wouldn't quite dissolve.

A waiter passed with a fresh tray. I set my glass down as I reached for a canapé, and when I straightened, I had a new one in my hand. Full. Clear. Nobody watching would have seen the switch. I'd practiced smaller sleights of hand than that for years, hiding cash from a husband who thought "babe, you don't need the headache."

I let my next sentence trail halfway through. Blinked slow. Swayed, just slightly, into the back of a chair.

"You okay?" Palmer's hand caught my elbow. His voice had a new note in it—not concern. Anticipation.

"Just tired," I said, soft, syllables loose at the edges. "Long week."

"We'll get you somewhere quiet," he said, and over my shoulder I heard him murmur something to Iris. A name. A number. *Room 1408.*

I let my eyes drift closed for a second too long, then open again, glassy and unfocused, exactly the way a woman would look if the drug in her glass had actually made it into her blood.

Under the little clutch in my hand, my thumb found my phone. I didn't look down. I typed by feel, the way I used to text under the dinner table when Owen was small and needed watching.

*Meridian Grand. Room 1408.*

*It's tonight.*

Then I sent it, slipped the phone away, and let Palmer walk me toward the elevator, his hand warm and steady on my back, guiding me exactly where he wanted me to go.