I had always had it.
My grandmother had known that, and had left me the means, and it had taken a beating to make me reach for it at last.
They walked into that empty room expecting to find their obedient victim.
They found, instead, the first morning of a war they had already lost and did not yet know it.
Chapter 9 — Apex Vantage
While I healed, my attorney and a forensic team followed the money, and the picture that assembled itself was far larger and far uglier than a family that hit their daughter-in-law.
Indigo’s old property loan had begun as a legitimate mortgage.
After his business failed, I had poured my own savings into keeping the house afloat, believing I was helping family.
What I had not known was that all the while, Bruno had been telling everyone that his parents were the ones contributing cash to the household — when in fact the bank statements showed heavy, recurring deposits coming from a shell corporation called Apex Vantage Group.
And Apex Vantage Group, it turned out, was registered as an external consulting vendor for Bruno’s own employer.
Its invoices to the firm were suspiciously round numbers, repeated every month, frequently exceeding forty thousand dollars for vaguely described “operational logistics” that no one could quite explain.
I did not need a forensic accountant to tell me what that smelled like; I am a forensic accountant myself, though my in-laws had spent ten years treating my profession as a cute hobby.
It smelled exactly like what it was: money being pulled out of a company through fake vendor invoices, and washed, and brought home.
My husband was not a commercial director who had married into a difficult family.
My husband was running a fraud.
