Here’s what my family didn’t understand about being married to a senior risk auditor: they’d been stealing from someone whose entire profession is detecting exactly what they were doing, and they’d gotten away with it only because I’d made the one mistake I’d have flagged instantly in any client — I’d trusted the people closest to me and stopped auditing my own house.
I never make that mistake again. That’s the last thing I learned that morning on the bathroom floor.
The $480,000 explained everything. Eric hadn’t decided to rob me while I was in Paris. He’d been robbing me for two years. The Paris trip wasn’t the beginning of the theft. It was the endgame — the final move to grab the house, the big credit line, the last liquid assets, and then divorce me before I noticed the two years of smaller thefts that had funded Richard’s failing company, Nebula Systems, all along.
