Chapter 7 - The Old Files
Three weeks after my conversation with Brooke, Dana called with news that shifted the entire shape of our case once again.
"I want you to come in," she said. "There's something in the financial disclosures I think you'll want to see in person."
I sat across from her desk that afternoon as she slid a series of documents toward me — bank statements, business filings, and, curiously, a set of consulting invoices from a firm I didn't recognize, billed to Nathan's company over the past eighteen months.
"Recognize this?" Dana asked, pointing to the firm's name: Dalton Strategic Consulting.
I stared at it. "Brooke's last name is Dalton."
"It's her consulting business," Dana confirmed. "Formed roughly two years ago, according to the state business registry. And over the past eighteen months, Nathan's company has paid Dalton Strategic Consulting just under two hundred thousand dollars for what's described, vaguely, as 'strategic communications services.'"
"Is that legitimate? Could she actually be doing real work for his company?"
"It's possible," Dana said carefully. "But given everything else we've documented — the affair, the Charleston trip that coincided suspiciously with a 'consulting engagement' listed on one of these invoices, the stepmother designation made months before any of this financial relationship would have naturally required that level of family integration — I think it's worth having Priya's counterpart on the forensic accounting side take a closer look."
I thought about Priya Nair, whom I'd heard about through a friend's own difficult divorce the previous year, and Dana confirmed she'd already reached out to a similarly skilled forensic accountant, a meticulous man named Felix Adeyemi, who specialized in exactly this kind of financial entanglement.
Felix's initial review, completed over the following two weeks, revealed a pattern considerably more troubling than a simple inflated consulting fee. Several of the invoices corresponded almost exactly to periods when Brooke had traveled with Nathan — not just Charleston, but two additional trips, each disguised on the corporate books as legitimate business travel tied to consulting deliverables that, upon closer examination, appeared to have never actually been produced.
"In plain terms," Felix explained, during our joint meeting with Dana, "your husband appears to have been using company funds — which, given his ownership stake, are also, at least partially, marital assets subject to division in your divorce — to fund a relationship, disguised as legitimate business consulting."
"Is that illegal?" I asked. "Or just a marital asset issue?"
"Both, potentially," Dana said. "If this constitutes fraudulent business expense reporting, that's a matter for the company's other shareholders, and possibly tax authorities, entirely separate from our divorce case. But for our purposes, it significantly strengthens your position regarding asset division — this represents substantial marital funds diverted for purposes entirely unrelated to legitimate business need, during a period when you were, unknowingly, still contributing your own labor and presence to maintaining the appearance of a stable family unit he was simultaneously working to dismantle."
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I sat with the full weight of it — nearly two hundred thousand dollars, funneled through invoices to fund an affair I'd only just discovered, layered now beneath the stepmother designation, the emergency contact removal, the recital incident, an entire architecture of quiet, systematic deception I was only now, slowly, fully excavating.
"I want everything documented," I told Dana and Felix. "Every invoice, every trip, every discrepancy. I'm done being surprised by pieces of this. I want the whole picture, all at once, so nothing else can quietly emerge later to catch me off guard again."
