I spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling, the cash lined up on the nightstand like soldiers waiting for orders. I didn’t sleep a wink. By the time the pale morning light filtered through the grimy window, the sadness had hardened into a cold, calculating rage.
Marriage
They wanted a ghost? I would give them one. But this ghost was going to haunt them until they lost everything.
At 9:00 AM, the time my original flight was scheduled to land at its first layover, I went to a nearby electronics store. I bought a burner phone and a cheap laptop, paying entirely in cash.
When I turned on the laptop and connected to a public Wi-Fi network at a crowded coffee shop, I began my investigation. If I wanted to take down a multi-million dollar empire, I needed to know who the players were. I searched for the pregnant woman. It didn’t take long to find her. Her name was hidden in plain sight on social media—she was a junior executive at my husband’s marketing firm. Her posts from months ago showed subtle hints: a watch that looked exactly like one my husband claimed to have “lost,” check-ins at luxury hotels on weekends he was supposedly on business trips.
Handbags & Purses
But the most recent post, uploaded just an hour ago, made my blood boil. It was a photo of her holding a sonogram, captioning it: “New beginnings. A new home, a new life, and a family finally complete.”
The comments were filled with congratulations. And there, liking the photo, was my mother-in-law.
They were already celebrating. They thought I was dead, or about to be.
Suddenly, my burner phone buzzed. I gasped, nearly dropping it. It shouldn’t have been ringing; no one had the number. Then I realized it was a news alert I had set up for my husband’s company name and my own name.
