But I knew I couldn’t be her attorney of record. Loving the client makes for disastrous legal counsel. The wound was too close to the bone. So, I called Rebecca Thorne. Rebecca was a shark in a tailored suit, a divorce attorney who had never once in her illustrious career confused professional politeness with weakness.
When Rebecca arrived at my dining room table, she didn’t offer empty platitudes. She poured a cup of black coffee, looked Madeline in the eye, and asked the only question that mattered.
“Madeline, are there any financial accounts that Spencer has unilateral access to?”
Madeline shrank into her chair, her eyes darting away. “He… he handles almost all of the household finances. He said he was better at it.”
I closed my eyes, fighting a wave of nausea. The inheritance.
William had worked himself into an early grave building a proprietary logistics software. When his heart failed, he left Madeline six million dollars in a protected trust. I had begged her to keep it entirely segregated before the wedding. She had promised me she would.
“Maddie,” I said softly. “The trust?”
“Spencer came to me about a year ago,” she whispered, twisting her fingers together. “He used all these terms. Tax optimization. Strategic family growth. Aggressive yield planning. He said that if I insisted on keeping the money completely separate, it meant I didn’t truly trust him. He said it meant I was already planning for our divorce.”
Rebecca’s pen scratched furiously across her legal pad. I hated how agonizingly familiar the narrative was. Economic abuse rarely announces itself with a masked robbery. It slithers in through the backdoor of romance, framing financial independence as a betrayal of intimacy.
“We need a forensic accountant. Today,” Rebecca announced.
