For seven years, Marcus had assumed I was blind. He assumed that because I stayed home — managing his laundry, arranging his calendar, absorbing his alcohol-fueled rages — I wasn’t paying attention.

He’d forgotten that before I married him, I earned a master’s degree in corporate compliance.

I opened the encrypted archive I’d been quietly building for eighteen months.

Inside were thousands of pages of cross-referenced documents: private ledgers from his firm showing clear patterns of insider trading, shell-company routing numbers used to hide offshore kickbacks, and personal bank statements detailing the monthly payments he sent to a high-end escort service in Chicago under the label “regional consulting fees.”

But the centerpiece of the collection was a video recorded three weeks earlier by our home security system — a system Marcus believed he’d fully locked down, not realizing I still held the master administrative account.

The footage showed him cornering me in the study, screaming into my face, and hurling a heavy crystal decanter at my head, missing by inches, then forcing me to clean up the shattered glass on my knees.