He transferred the recordings to my phone and gave me a signed statement detailing what he had witnessed. “If you need additional testimony, three of my servers have agreed. They were deeply shocked by what they saw.”
Two days later, I was sitting opposite Margaret Chin in a quiet cafe she had chosen, far from the circles Travis frequented. She seemed different from the woman I remembered from business meetings: more serene, more fit, as if she had overcome a long ordeal.
“Bradley destroyed me during our divorce,” she stated bluntly. “But it was Travis who orchestrated the strategy. He coached Bradley: what to say, which experts to quote, how to portray me as unstable. I kept the emails.”
She handed me a file with a firm gesture. “Travis billed Bradley fifty thousand dollars for this advice. It’s detailed under the heading ‘legal advice’.”
She took a breath. “What they hadn’t anticipated was that I had recorded Bradley rehearsing his testimony. Travis’s voice is unmistakable; he was telling him which phrases might raise doubts about my parenting skills.”
“Why didn’t you introduce him earlier?” I asked gently.
“I was scared,” she said calmly. “It took me two years of therapy before I could even examine the evidence. But after learning what he did to you on your birthday, I realized I couldn’t wait any longer.”
She leaned forward, determination hardening her expression.
“Travis Mitchell has already done enough harm to women. It has to stop with us.”
That evening, Rachel arrived with her laptop and an archive box full of documents. While Travis was at his poker night, we covered the dining room table with papers. Seeing it all at once was astounding: bank statements revealing embezzlement, emails detailing affairs and hidden assets, Henri’s video immortalizing my public humiliation, Margaret’s recordings of Travis teaching someone how to lie under oath.
“Here’s what I found on the client accounts,” Rachel said, opening a spreadsheet. “Adelaide Morrison, 83, is charged $500 in service fees per month, which don’t appear on her official statements. George Whitman, 78, is being charged for portfolio management of accounts that have been inactive for years. Small amounts have also been taken from the accounts of seventeen elderly clients.”
“How many in total?” I asked.
“Two and a half million over five years. He always respected the mandatory reporting thresholds. Taken individually, these amounts seem insignificant. Collectively, it is a textbook case of financial exploitation of the elderly.”
I stared at the figures, thinking back to Mrs. Morrison’s Christmas card last year: her neat handwriting thanking Travis for looking after her late husband’s estate. She had trusted him implicitly. And he had quietly siphoned money off month after month, convinced she would never notice.
“We’ve had more than enough,” Rachel said. “Financial misconduct. Evidence of infidelity. Videos of psychological abuse. A conspiracy to commit perjury. Each of these triggers the moral turpitude clause in your prenuptial agreement. Together? He doesn’t just risk losing his divorce. He could lose everything.”
I picked up my grandmother’s emerald earrings from the table. Their tiny stones sparkled with light. She survived the Great Depression by selling her chickens’ eggs. After my grandfather died, she raised her three children alone. She never apologized for doing what was necessary to survive.
“Then we’ll make sure he loses everything,” I said, my voice more confident than it had been in years. “Absolutely everything.”
That Sunday evening, Rachel and I divided the evidence into four separate packages, each addressed to a different authority. We wore latex gloves, as if we were handling hazardous materials. In a way, we were. The financial offenses were for the SEC and the IRS. The client exploitation documents were for the state attorney general. The fourth envelope was for someone else.
On Monday evening, I called to say I was sick on Tuesday—my first absence in three years. The headmaster didn’t press the matter; the fatigue in my voice was enough to explain my absence. Travis barely noticed that I’d gone to bed early, too busy with international conference calls to pay any attention.
I set my alarm for 5 a.m. and prepared my clothes in the guest bathroom so as not to disturb him.
The federal building opened at 8:00 a.m. sharp. I arrived fifteen minutes early and watched the employees go through security, their coffee cups and folded newspapers in hand. My hands were shaking as I placed the envelopes on the X-ray scanner’s conveyor belt.
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