“Could any of this create liability for me?” I asked my attorney, flatly.

“Now that the divorce is final and your assets are fully separated — no,” he said.

“But we should document, thoroughly, that you had no knowledge of and no part in his corporate accounts.”

So we kept looking.

Not for revenge.

For self-preservation.

And what we found was that the spectacular growth that had made Spencer the rising star of Halstead Global was, in significant part, manufactured — built out of illegal accounting shortcuts and money routed through shell companies.

The moment I understood the true scale of it, and understood that fraudulent documents with his signature could one day be dragged toward anything my name still touched, I did the only rational thing.