Chapter 6 - Why Hunter Chose Me
The truth Barbara revealed was less criminal than the fraud and somehow more intimate. Years before Hunter met me, his father had established a family investment partnership. Hunter’s access to a significant portion of his inheritance depended on maintaining stable employment and avoiding certain financial liabilities. When Hunter accumulated private trading losses in his late twenties, he concealed them. Then he met me: an actuarial-science graduate student with excellent credit, predictable income, and an almost pathological respect for financial planning.
Barbara believed Hunter initially pursued me partly because I made him look stable.
I wanted to reject the idea.
Then she showed me an email he had sent her three months after our engagement.
Selena makes everything cleaner on paper. Dad loves her. Once we’re married, nobody will question anything.
I sat in Camille’s office reading it repeatedly.
“Was our whole marriage fake?”
Camille leaned back.
“That email proves he was calculating. It does not prove every moment was fake.”
I hated nuance.
I wanted Hunter to have always been a monster because monsters were easier to leave behind.
But life refused simplicity.
He had held me when my mother died.
He had driven overnight to attend my first academic conference.
He had once spent an entire weekend helping me reconstruct a corrupted data set.
Those things happened.
So did the kitchen.
A person could love you and still become someone you must leave.
That realization finally freed me from needing to rewrite my entire past.
The trial began in October.
I testified for nearly four hours.
Hunter sat across the courtroom wearing a conservative navy suit. He looked thinner.
His attorney tried to portray the assault as a family argument exaggerated by divorce.
“Mrs. Cole—”
“Dr. Reyes,” I corrected.
The attorney paused.
“Dr. Reyes, your mother-in-law did the cutting, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Cole never held scissors?”
“No.”
“So he never cut you?”
“He restrained my arms while someone else did.”
The prosecutor objected when the attorney attempted to suggest I had “provoked” the conflict by prioritizing work.
The judge sustained it.
Then came the photographs.
Hair across the kitchen floor.
Bruises.
Scratch.
Messages.
Financial records.
Nathan’s testimony.
Barbara’s testimony.
And finally the recording.
Whatever works.
Hunter stared straight ahead as his own voice filled the courtroom.
The jury deliberated less than a day.
Guilty on multiple fraud-related counts and unlawful restraint.
When the verdict was read, Hunter finally looked at me.
There was no rage.
Only disbelief.
As though consequences were something that happened to other people.
Outside the courthouse, reporters waited.
I refused interviews.
I did not want my career reduced to what my ex-husband had done.
Julian was waiting across the street.
He had offered to come but promised to stay away unless I wanted him.
I crossed toward him.
“How did it go?”
“Guilty.”
He nodded.
Then asked the most Julian question possible.
“What do you need?”
I thought about it.
“Coffee.”
“Coffee I can do.”
We walked three blocks.
Halfway there, I reached for his hand.
He looked down.
Then at me.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
His fingers closed gently around mine.
No fireworks.
No dramatic kiss.
May you like
Just warmth.
For the first time, that was enough.
