Chapter 4 - THE HOUSE SHE COULDN’T GO BACK TOBy noon, Elena had an attorney.
Not a dramatic television lawyer.
A forty-eight-year-old Nashville family-law attorney named Leah Benton who wore reading glasses on a chain and asked Elena practical questions before emotional ones.
“Do you intend to return home today?”
“No.”
“Good. Do you have medication, identification, work equipment, and enough clothes?”
“No.”
“We’ll arrange a safe retrieval.”
Leah also referred Elena to a criminal-defense attorney for advice about the corporate investigation.
That frightened Elena.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Then you want someone ensuring you don’t accidentally make your position harder while proving that.”
Elena understood.
She spent the afternoon changing passwords.
Banking.
Personal email.
Cloud storage.
Phone account.
She rerouted her paycheck to an individual checking account she had maintained since before the marriage.
She did not drain joint accounts.
Leah specifically warned her not to.
“Protecting yourself is different from creating a financial fight.”
The distinction mattered.
Hannah helped her list what she needed from the house.
Clothes.
Passport.
Jewelry inherited from their grandmother.
Personal files.
Her work laptop, which Merritt & Cole had instructed her not to touch until IT could collect it.
Two police officers accompanied her to the house that evening for a civil standby.
Julian was there.
Victoria was gone.
He watched Elena enter their bedroom.
The bed had been stripped.
The champagne glasses were gone.
So was the blue folder.
Elena stopped beside the dresser.
“You cleaned everything.”
Julian leaned against the doorway.
“It’s my bedroom too.”
“For now.”
He flinched.
Elena opened a drawer.
“You’re really doing this?”
She folded sweaters into a suitcase.
“You hit me.”
“You pushed me.”
“After you hit me twice and kicked me.”
“I lost control.”
“That isn’t helping.”
Julian lowered his voice.
“Elena, the company could collapse.”
She looked at him.
“Which company?”
“Mine.”
“Interesting.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You seem more afraid of Ward Collaborative than our marriage.”
He stepped closer.
One of the officers moved into view from the hallway.
Julian stopped.
“I built that company for fourteen years.”
“And we were married for seven.”
“You think that makes this simple?”
“No.”
Elena zipped the suitcase.
“I think hitting me made one part simple.”
She carried her belongings downstairs.
Near the home office, she noticed something.
The small personal printer beside Julian’s desk had a blue stain on the output tray.
Ink.
The same saturated blue Merritt & Cole used for confidential procurement covers.
It might mean nothing.
She photographed it without touching anything.
Then she noticed the wastebasket.
Empty.
Julian had taken the trash out.
On a Wednesday.
Trash pickup was Friday.
For years, Elena had complained that he forgot.
Now he had remembered early.
Back at Hannah’s condo, Merritt & Cole’s IT security director called.
“Elena, we collected your work laptop.”
“Okay.”
“There’s another issue.”
Her chest tightened.
“We found evidence that the restricted pricing directory wasn’t accessed just once.”
“How many times?”
“Four.”
Elena sat down.
“From where?”
“Three sessions appear associated with your normal home network.”
“And the fourth?”
The security director paused.
“From the Belle Meade house while you were logged into a video conference from our Chicago office.”
Elena remembered the trip.
She had been presenting to executives five hundred miles away.
Someone had been using her access from Nashville at the same time.
The opening assault had not been isolated.
May you like
Neither had the stolen folder.
Someone had been entering Merritt & Cole systems through Elena’s professional identity for weeks.
Related Stories
