Husband Fled with First Love, I Saved World with Medical Expertise Chapter 05

Fifteen days into the lockdown, Adrian’s call volume spiked.

Not me. His mother.

Every time, it was after dinner. Evelyn would retreat to her bedroom, clicking the door shut with pointed secrecy.

I didn’t listen anymore.

I didn’t need to.

Everything worth knowing, I already knew.

Online, I found out Adrian had another asset in his name, a prime commercial space.

We bought it after we got married. The down payment had been about $41,000, and I’d personally kicked in twenty-seven thousand.

The deed only carried his name.

At the time, he’d said, “It’s easier to secure the financing as a solo applicant. I’ll add you later.”

Three years had passed.

He never did.

I checked the public filings.

Transferred.

Transfer date: eight weeks ago.

Buyer: a company called Sterling Crown Properties.

Sterling Crown.

I didn’t need to check the SEC filings to know whose company it was.

The unit was worth at least a quarter-million.

It had been sold to Vivian’s company for $132,000.

Almost half off.

Add that to the $62,500 he’d already siphoned out of our joint account.

By the time I finished doing the math, Adrian had effectively laundered nearly $200,000 out of our marital assets.

And I was left with $586 and a mortgage that wasn’t going anywhere.

That afternoon, he sent me a file.

A PDF.

At the top, in neat black letters, it said: Divorce Settlement Agreement.

I read it line by line.

The apartment would go to the wife along with the full weight of the mortgage.

The husband would assume no debt including the credit card he had opened in my name.

Each party would retain their own assets. In Adrian-speak, that meant the money he’d stolen was officially gone.

No child custody issues.

That was the only truthful line in the entire document.

The last line read: [The wife agrees to sign and return this agreement within seven days.]

Seven days.

He was basking in the Kensington sun with another woman while giving me a one-week deadline to sign my own death warrant.

I set my phone down on the table.

At some point, Evelyn had come up behind me.

“You saw it?” she asked flatly.

“Yeah.”

“Then sign it.”

I turned to look at her.

She was leaning against the doorframe, arms folded, looking like she’d been waiting for this moment for years.

“Claire, let me be blunt. Adrian’s heart has moved on. There’s no point in hanging on.”

“Evelyn, you knew he transferred all the money out of our joint account to Vivian, didn’t you?”

Something flickered in her eyes, but she steadied herself almost immediately.

“That was an investment.”

“And you also knew the Hawthorne space was sold to her for peanuts.”

“That was Adrian’s business.”

“I paid twenty-seven thousand toward the down payment.”

She lifted her chin.

“Before you married Adrian, weren’t you just a broke grad student? You ate his food, lived in his home for years. What was twenty-seven thousand, compared to that?”

I looked at her.

This woman I had taken care of for three years.

When her blood pressure spiked, I was the one knocking on the neighbor’s door in the middle of the night for medication.

I was the one who kept track of every one of her dietary restrictions.

Every week, I was the one scrubbing her laundry and making sure her life was comfortable.

And she said, What was twenty-seven thousand?

Something snapped inside me.

I picked up my phone, closed the PDF, opened my contacts, and dialed.

“Daniel, it’s Claire. I need a divorce lawyer.”

The color drained from Evelyn’s face.

“What exactly was that supposed to mean?”

“It meant this,” I said. “If Adrian wanted a divorce, I’d give him one. But not on his terms.”

I paused, letting the silence hang.

“I’ll sign. Just not that version.”