Chapter 4 - The Business Ava Never Knew Existed
Grace helped Ava look up the old company.
It had been called North & Vale Events.
Nolan North.
Sabrina Vale.
The business had existed for less than two years.
Wedding planning.
Corporate dinners.
Church fundraisers.
Small luxury events around the county.
That explained the church annex.
Years earlier, North & Vale had coordinated seasonal events for the parish.
Sabrina still volunteered there occasionally.
Nolan had not mentioned that either.
Public business filings showed the company dissolved five years earlier.
They did not show who owed whom money afterward.
Ava asked Nolan for records.
He brought a storage box.
Not digital files.
Receipts.
Bank statements.
Old contracts.
He had apparently kept everything.
That helped his credibility slightly.
It also created another problem.
Sabrina had contributed $54,000.
Nolan contributed $18,000 plus equipment.
When the business collapsed, debts consumed most of the remaining cash.
A final internal spreadsheet showed Sabrina with an unrecovered contribution of $31,400.
Nolan’s figure was much lower.
Ava pointed to it.
“You said forty.”
“I didn't remember exactly.”
“You remembered enough to hide it.”
Nolan said Sabrina once told him to forget the money.
Ava asked whether that was in writing.
No.
“Convenient.”
“It was after her mother died. She wanted the whole thing gone.”
“And then you slept with her years later.”
Nolan winced.
Ava was not trying to be cruel.
She was establishing sequence.
Sabrina had lost money with Nolan.
Their relationship ended badly.
Years later Nolan married Ava.
During a marital crisis, he slept with Sabrina.
Then Sabrina began demanding something from him again.
Money.
Confession.
Maybe both.
Nolan insisted the affair had not restarted afterward.
Ava wanted to believe that.
Then Grace noticed an expense in their own joint checking account.
A $4,500 withdrawal from April.
Ava had been five months pregnant.
She remembered Nolan saying it went toward replacing an HVAC system in one of his rental properties.
The contractor invoice existed.
For $2,900.
“What happened to the other sixteen hundred?”
Nolan stopped answering.
Ava knew before he said it.
“Sabrina?”
“Yes.”
Ava pushed herself slowly away from the table.
“You paid her while I was pregnant.”
“She called it partial repayment.”
“And told me nothing.”
“I thought if I started paying her back, she’d finally leave us alone.”
Ava laughed once.
“Us?”
Nolan looked confused.
“You keep saying she threatened us. She wasn’t married to me. She didn’t owe me thirty-one thousand dollars. She didn’t sleep with me while I was married.”
His face tightened.
Ava continued.
May you like
“You keep making Sabrina sound like a storm that happened to you.”
That was the first time Nolan stopped defending himself.
