Chapter 1 — The Woman I’d Been Molded Into
Five years of marriage had taught me to make myself small.
My husband, Marshall, had a talent for it — a hundred quiet corrections, a thousand small deferrals, until the woman who walked out of the corner office at Rollins Global Enterprises had become the woman who asked permission to redecorate her own kitchen.
But I had not always been that woman, and somewhere under five years of being managed, she was still awake.
Before I married him, I was Regina Rollins — the youngest chief financial officer in the history of my family’s company, a logistics and development empire my grandfather had built from a single freight yard.
I could read a balance sheet the way other people read faces.
And six months before the night everything changed, I had started reading Marshall’s — the odd expenses, the trips that didn’t reconcile, the way his phone had learned to sleep face-down.
I hadn’t screamed or confronted him.
I had quietly hired a private investigator and started a folder.
I told myself I was being paranoid.
I was not being paranoid.
I was being a CFO.
Chapter 2 — The Canceled Flight
Three days before Christmas, a blizzard closed the Rockies and canceled my flight to Salt Lake City.
I came home unannounced to our house in Cherry Hills Village, carrying a box of the caramel chocolates Marshall loved, thinking I’d surprise him.
I heard the laughter before I reached the stairs — his, and a woman’s, drifting down from our bedroom.
He was supposed to be at a late corporate meeting.
Nadia — my sister-in-law, my brother Lionel’s wife — was supposed to be in Boulder tending her sick mother.