We filed a full criminal complaint with the state prosecutor — fraud, coercion, the falsifying of medical records, and the financial crimes tangled through it all.

We secured protective orders.

We got an emergency freeze on the suspicious accounts.

And Christian’s personal assistant, the man who had helped orchestrate the whole quiet machine, was picked up at an airport hotel trying to leave the country.

At first he said nothing.

Then he understood that Christian had no intention of paying for his defense, and his loyalty evaporated, and he told the investigators everything — how the payments had been routed through a shell company run by Christian’s cousin, how the plan had always been to manage me out of the picture without a single public mark on Christian’s name.

He had assumed, the whole time, that the story would hold.