Chapter 8 — The Paper Trail

My attorney, Eloise Langford, pulled the rest of it into the light with the patient thoroughness of a woman who had seen this exact species of man many times before.

She found forged signatures — mine, on documents I had never signed.

She found hidden transfers, money moved out of reach in the months before he left, methodical as a man draining a pond before he sells the field.

She found a chain of emails between Cassian and the clinic administrator that read, once you understood what you were looking at, like a receipt for the purchase of my own defectiveness.

He had not merely abandoned me.