“No,” I said. “Finally. I’m not.”
Victoria nodded. She opened a drawer and pulled out a legal pad.
“Good,” she said. “Then let’s get to work.”
For 30 years, I’d built structures designed to last for generations. Now I was being asked to build something designed to destroy.
Victoria slid the legal pad across her desk. On it, she’d sketched a timeline: 30 days from the retirement announcement to the actual wire transfer.
“Washington is a community property state,” she said. “Default is 50/50. Everything acquired during the marriage gets split down the middle.”
I felt my stomach drop. “So Richard gets half normally.”
“Yes.” Victoria tapped her pen against the pad. “But there are exceptions. Adultery. Fraud. Timing. If we can prove Richard and Emily conspired to defraud you, and if we can protect the funds before they officially become marital property, we can shift the balance.”
She leaned forward. “Your retirement package hasn’t transferred yet. Morrison and Partners has a 30-day processing window. That gives us time.”
“Time for what?” I asked.
“Time to build a strategy,” Victoria said, steady and clinical. “We hire a private investigator to document everything—Richard’s affair, Emily’s involvement, the computer access logs. We establish an irrevocable trust to protect the funds. And we file first, before they know what’s coming.”
I stared at the timeline.
Thirty days.
Thirty days to dismantle a marriage, a family, a life I’d spent three decades building.
“If I do this,” I said slowly, “I lose her forever.”
Victoria’s expression didn’t soften. “Catherine, I think you’ve already lost her. You just haven’t accepted it yet.”
I pulled the drawing from my bag, the one I’d found in my car the night before. Emily’s childhood sketch—the house made of crayon, the wobbly letters, my builder mother.
The memory came back so sharp it hurt. She was eight years old. It was a Saturday morning in late spring, and I’d brought her to my office because Richard had a golf game and couldn’t watch her.
I’d expected her to be bored—to complain, to ask when we could leave. Instead, she’d climbed onto the stool beside my drafting table and watched me work.
“What are you drawing, Mama?”
“A house,” I said. “For a family in Aqua.”
“They want big windows so they can see the mountains.”
Emily had reached for a piece of scrap paper and a box of crayons. Her tongue stuck out in concentration the way mine did when I was deep in a design. For twenty minutes, she drew in silence: a square house with a triangle roof, four windows, a red door, a sun in the corner.
When she finished, she held it up. “Look, Mama. I made a house, too.”
I’d taken it from her small hands, studied the careful lines, the way she tried to make the windows even.
“It’s beautiful, sweetheart.”
She’d beamed. “When I grow up, I want to build houses like you, Mama.”
I’d kissed her forehead. “You can build anything you want, sweetheart. Anything at all.”
Now she was building my destruction.
I set the drawing on Victoria’s desk, my hands shaking again.
“What if she didn’t mean it?” I asked. “What if she’s being manipulated by Richard?”
“Does it matter?” Victoria’s tone wasn’t cruel, just honest. “She accessed your files. She copied your documents. She’s helping him plan a legal strategy against you. Whether she’s doing it willingly or under duress, the result is the same.”
I closed my eyes.
Thirty years. Thirty years of missed recitals because I had a site inspection. Thirty years of working late while Richard took Emily to the park. Thirty years of sacrificing time for money, presence for security.
Maybe this was what I’d earned.
No.
The word came out stronger than I expected. I opened my eyes.
“I didn’t sacrifice 30 years to hand it over to a man who gave up and a daughter who thinks I deserve to be punished for working.”
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