The Amicable Separation / Chapter 5 / 15

Chapter 5 - Jenna's BusinessThe deeper Priya dug into JC Consulting LLC, the stranger the picture became.

"It's not really a functioning business," Priya explained, spreading printouts across Devon's conference table two weeks later. "There's a website, very minimal, describing 'boutique event styling services.' No actual client list I can find. No invoices for completed work. What I can find is thirty thousand dollars deposited from your home equity line, followed almost immediately by a series of transfers — a leased luxury car, a designer handbag purchase, and a deposit toward the same apartment at Willow Glen Drive."

"So it's not a business," I said. "It's a laundering mechanism. A way to move our money to her without it looking, on paper, like he's just handing his girlfriend cash."

"That's certainly what it looks like," Devon agreed. "Which actually strengthens your position considerably. This isn't a man who made one impulsive, poorly considered decision. This is someone who set up a corporate entity specifically to obscure where marital funds were going."

I thought about Jenna at the block party, holding wine from my own kitchen, wearing a dress I'd mistaken for something professional. I thought about her soft, almost gentle voice saying it's probably better for everyone, as though she'd been given a script by someone who specialized in making cruelty sound reasonable.

"Do you think she knows?" I asked. "That the money is coming from our home equity? That it's not really his to give?"

"Hard to say," Devon said. "Some women in her position genuinely don't ask questions they'd rather not have answered. Others know exactly what they're participating in and simply don't care, as long as the money keeps arriving. Either way, Claire, it doesn't change your legal position. The funds are marital property, misappropriated without your informed consent, and that's what matters for the case we're building."

I left that meeting and drove, without entirely deciding to, past 218 Willow Glen Drive — a newer apartment complex on the edge of town, all clean brick and tidy landscaping, the kind of place that photographed well for a fresh start. I didn't get out of the car. I simply sat there for several minutes, looking at the building where my husband had apparently been quietly constructing an entire second life, funded by money I had spent seventeen years helping to earn, save, and protect.

My phone buzzed. A text from Scott: Can we talk tonight? I feel like things have been weird between us.

Weird. As though the last two weeks had been an unfortunate mood rather than the methodical unraveling of every assumption I'd built my adult life on.

I didn't respond immediately. I sat in my car outside the apartment my husband had rented for his girlfriend with money forged and misdirected from our shared life, and I thought, with a calm that surprised me, about exactly how I wanted this confrontation to eventually happen — not quietly, not in our kitchen where Scott could control the volume and the narrative the way he always had.

Somewhere public. Somewhere he couldn't manage the room the way he'd managed it at the block party, smiling easily while introducing my replacement to our neighbors as though it were simply good news.