Chapter 7 - SOMEONE HAD BUILT A SECOND ABIGAIL
The investment account contained $186,000.
Money had entered from Whitmore and two other Mercer vendors.
Then some had moved out.
Tax payments.
A wire to a brokerage account.
A transfer that appeared to pay down a personal credit line.
On paper, I looked busy.
The only problem was that I had done none of it.
The account application used my Social Security number.
My date of birth.
My previous address.
A scan of my driver’s license.
Information Derek had possessed for years.
The contact phone number was unfamiliar.
Caroline traced it through discovery.
A prepaid line.
The email address was worse.
abigail.r.mercer@protonmail.
Close enough to look plausible.
Not mine.
The financial institution had retained account-opening records.
The application had been submitted online from an IP address associated with our home.
That alone proved nothing.
Derek lived there too.
Then Priya found the first subtle inconsistency.
The account application listed my annual income as $310,000.
I earned $148,000.
Derek earned approximately $310,000 including bonuses.
Maybe coincidence.
Then the security question.
First vehicle owned?
Jeep Cherokee.
I had never owned one.
Derek had.
Then a beneficiary designation.
Elaine Mercer.
I stared at the page.
“Why would anyone opening an account pretending to be me name Elaine?”
Priya answered carefully.
“Because the person doing it may have been thinking about their own relationships rather than yours.”
Three small details.
Derek’s income.
Derek’s first car.
Derek’s mother.
A fake version of me had been assembled from pieces of him.
But that was still not the most frightening pattern.
The account opened seven months before my fall.
The suspicious vendor payments increased afterward.
At approximately the same time, Derek began encouraging me to move more accounting work onto my home laptop.
“Better work-life balance,” he had called it.
He ordered me a new computer.
He configured it himself.
I felt sick remembering how grateful I had been.
Priya asked whether I still had the computer.
Investigators had already seized it from our home office.
Good.
That meant nobody could alter it now.
The broader family began choosing sides.
Derek’s sister, Monica, called me.
She had lived in Seattle for fifteen years and stayed mostly outside the company.
“Tell me this isn't what people are saying.”
“What are people saying?”
“That Derek stole from Dad and put it under your name.”
“I don't know the final answer yet.”
“Mom says you're framing him.”
“Of course she does.”
Monica cried.
“I don't know who to believe.”
For once, I did not demand loyalty.
“Then don't believe anyone yet. Wait for records.”
That conversation changed something in me.
Before the fall, I desperately wanted people to understand I was right.
Now I wanted them to stop taking family narratives as evidence.
Later that week, a second pattern appeared.
The questionable transactions occurred disproportionately on nights Derek knew I was taking prescription pain medication for an old shoulder injury.
Nothing sinister had happened with the medication.
I took it rarely and appropriately.
But the dates mattered.
Those were nights I went to bed early.
Derek stayed awake.
The home laptop remained active.
I remembered one morning telling him I had dreamed someone was moving around the office.
He laughed.
“You're drugged, babe.”
At the time, it sounded affectionate.
Now it sounded like information.
Caroline asked the question I had been avoiding.
“Do you want to file for divorce?”
I looked at my casts.
At the account in my name.
At my husband’s car listed as my security answer.
“Yes.”
Saying it felt less dramatic than I expected.
It felt administrative.
Necessary.
Final in a way the staircase had not been.
Derek received the filing two days later.
His first response was not about our marriage.
It was a message through his attorney.
He demanded that I stop “interfering with company property and confidential financial systems.”
His second response came after Priya requested records from the investment account.
Derek filed an affidavit claiming I had independently controlled Mercer Millwork finances for years.
May you like
He was no longer merely denying fraud.
He was beginning to point directly at me.
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