And then I found the invoices, and my feelings about Sabrina Ferro reorganized themselves entirely, because I understood that she had not simply taken my husband.

She had, with my husband, been stealing from a company that was mostly mine, through a fake vendor registered to her own brother, to the tune of nearly half a million dollars.

She was not my rival.

She was my employee, and she was robbing me.

And that changed everything about how I could respond to her, because a wife betrayed by a mistress has only her heartbreak, which the law does not much care about — but an owner defrauded by a procurement director has canceled checks, and a vendor address matching a private condominium, and a paper trail that ends in handcuffs.

The red dress had made me feel like a discarded wife.