When My Ex-Husband Brought His Young Mistress to Our Son’s Pool Party to Humiliate Me, I Introduced Everyone to My Handsome New “Boyfriend” — He Laughed and Called It Pathetic, Certain I’d Hired an Actor, Until the Man Opened a Small Case and Said One Sentence That Drained the Color From His Face

Chapter 14 — Camellia

Camellia tried to slip past the agents toward the driveway, her heels catching on the flagstones, her young face gone slack with panic.

“Miss Camellia?” one of the agents said, stepping into her path without raising his voice.

“I’d ask you not to go far.

We have a federal seizure warrant for the property in Belize, and a subpoena for your personal bank records.” She made a sound then, a thin horrified shriek, as the shape of her own situation arrived all at once — the condo that wasn’t hers, the lifestyle that had been bought with stolen money, the man being folded into the back of an SUV who could no longer do a single thing for her.

I felt, looking at her, something I had not expected to feel, which was a flicker of something close to pity.