“…I know about the wire fraud in Arizona. And the two other wealthy men you ‘accidentally’ ran into right after their company payouts.”
The fake tears dried up instantly. Vanessa’s lower lip stopped trembling, and the helpless, fragile damsel-in-distress act vanished, replaced by a cold, hard glare. The color drained from her face as her eyes darted from the papers in her hands to my unwavering expression.
“You’re bluffing,” she hissed, though her voice shook.
“Page three,” I replied calmly, crossing my arms. “There’s an active warrant out of Maricopa County. It seems you forgot to appear in court after draining your last boyfriend’s accounts. It took my private investigator less than twenty-four hours to connect the dots.”
Vanessa swallowed hard, her grip tightening on the manila envelope.
“David doesn’t know about this,” she tried, puffing out her chest in a last-ditch effort to reclaim some power. “He loved me. He’ll want to hear my side.”
“David is a kind man with a big heart, which is exactly why you thought you could manipulate him again after ignoring his existence for a decade,” I said, stepping slightly out onto the porch to back her toward the stairs. “But I don’t have a soft spot for you. If you ever contact him again, if you show up at his gym, or if you ever step within five hundred feet of this house, the second copy of that file goes straight to the local police—and I’ll personally pay for your flight back to Arizona to face those charges.”
For a long moment, the only sound was the wind rustling through the oak trees in our front yard. Vanessa looked at the door, then at me, calculating her odds. She realized she had entirely misjudged the situation. She wasn’t dealing with her forgiving ex-husband; she was dealing with the woman who protected him.
Without another word, she shoved the envelope into her designer bag, spun on her heel, and practically sprinted down the driveway. Her car tires squealed as she sped out of the neighborhood into the night.
I took a deep breath, stepped back inside, and firmly locked the deadbolt.
When I turned around, David was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking confused and conflicted. “Where did she go? Is she alright?”
I walked over, wrapping my arms around him. “She remembered she had somewhere else to be,” I said softly. I pulled a duplicate folder from the hall table and handed it to him. “Sit down, honey. We need to have a talk about who was really standing on our porch.”
I watched as he read through the background check. The guilt he had felt about leaving her outside morphed into shock, and finally, profound relief. He dropped the folder on the coffee table, pulled me into a tight embrace, and whispered, “Thank you.”
We didn’t hear from Vanessa ever again. With the parasite finally gone, we spent the weekend planning our first real vacation with the company money—just the two of us.
