Chapter 5 - The Business That Was Already Dead
The accountant called Brett Monday morning.
ClearSpace Home Studio was not merely struggling.
It had effectively stopped operating six months earlier.
There were no new client deposits.
No payroll.
No meaningful material purchases.
Yet Dana had continued transferring household money into the business account.
Brett asked Colleen to meet him at a coffee shop near the DuPage County courthouse.
He slid a folder across the table.
“She told me she was rebuilding.”
Colleen studied the numbers.
“She wasn’t.”
“No.”
“What was the forty-seven thousand for?”
“We still don’t know.”
The accountant had found something else.
Dana had continued deducting expenses for a rented design studio in Oak Brook even though the landlord reported that ClearSpace vacated the unit in February.
The monthly payments labeled “studio” had been going elsewhere.
Colleen remembered visiting Dana in March.
Dana had complained about “clients leaving fingerprints everywhere.”
At the time Colleen assumed she meant her studio.
There had been no studio.
“So where was she going every day?” Colleen asked.
Brett’s jaw tightened.
He didn’t know.
That afternoon, Dana texted Brett repeatedly, demanding that he stop “digging through private company matters.”
Then she sent Colleen one message.
You should have minded your own family.
Colleen read it twice.
Not your own business.
Your own family.
That night Brett admitted another detail.
Two months earlier, Dana had begun sleeping in the guest room after he asked about ClearSpace’s finances.
“She said I was trying to control her.”
Colleen gave him a tired look.
“Were you?”
“I asked where our money was going.”
“That isn’t the question.”
Brett looked down.
He had been checking Dana’s location through a shared family app.
He had gone through her desk.
He had stopped depositing his full paycheck into their joint account.
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
Colleen understood the fear underneath those choices.
She also understood how quickly fear could become secrecy on both sides.
Before leaving, Brett said something he had avoided for days.
“I don’t think the money is the worst part.”
Colleen waited.
He swallowed.
“This wasn’t the first time Dana got physical.”
May you like
And suddenly the chain at the bottom of the stairs stopped looking like a single explosion.
It looked like the end of a pattern.
