The papers told it plainly, once Marguerite walked her through them.
For over a year, someone inside Corbin’s company had been feeding its most guarded information — internal property appraisals, private permit filings, the confidential bidding strategies that were the whole engine of the business — to a rival firm up in Seattle called Cascadia Development.
Cascadia had been winning contract after contract, always just barely, always as if they’d known exactly what number to beat.
And the leak, the documents showed, ran straight through Camilla Bramwell: a woman who had appeared at a charity gala on Corbin’s arm a year ago as if by chance, and had been quietly emptying his company into a competitor’s hands ever since.
“She isn’t just breaking his heart,” Marguerite said quietly.
“She’s stealing the thing he built with his whole life, one bid at a time.
And she made me the villain so that when I finally figured it out, no one would believe a single word I said.”
Adrienne understood, looking at the pages, that this was not a crime of passion or opportunity.
It was a campaign.
Someone had looked at Corbin Roberson — at his company, his contracts, the pipeline of land and permits and money that made him powerful — and decided the most efficient way to take it apart was not to compete with him in the open, but to place a person inside his life who could hand it over quietly from within.
Camilla had not stumbled into that charity gala.
She had been aimed at it.
Every warm dinner, every whispered doubt about his mother, every night she spent in his home had been, underneath, an act of extraction — and the isolation was not a side effect of the romance but the whole strategy, because a man cut off from everyone who loved him is a man with no one left to notice what’s being taken.
She had needed him alone in order to rob him blind.