It would never work on me again.
Chapter 22 — Karla
Then came the part I did not see coming, which was another woman.
Her name was Karla, and she owned a little nail salon across town, and Damian — I learned this from the financials — had described himself to the world as her “angel investor.” That was the clean version.
The real version was that Karla was his mistress, and that he had taken three hundred thousand dollars out of our joint savings, used it to open her salon, and then maneuvered her into signing a personal promissory note for one-point-two million dollars.
The money hadn’t gone into her business.
It had gone, like everything Damian touched, straight to Efrain.
He had used my savings to build a trap, and put a woman I’d never met inside it.
My first feeling, learning about her, was exactly what you’d expect.
Hatred, hot and simple.
The other woman.
And then I made myself actually read what he had done to her, line by line, and the hatred curdled into something more complicated, because I recognized it.
He had done to Karla precisely what he had done to me.
Sweet promises on the surface, a crushing hidden debt underneath, her signature on a document she didn’t understand, her whole future quietly wired to a criminal she’d never heard of.