Loss.
I considered him for a moment.
Then I stepped past him and motioned toward the conference room.
“Come on,” I said.
He followed, a flicker of hope returning to his expression.
Inside, I gestured for him to sit.
He did.
I remained standing.
“There’s one thing you’re right about,” I said.
His posture straightened slightly.
“You won’t walk away with nothing.”
Relief flashed across his face too quickly.
Then I placed a single document in front of him.
A detailed report.
Every transfer.
Every unauthorized use of funds.
Every account he had quietly accessed under the assumption I wasn’t paying attention.
“I’m offering you something,” I continued.
He looked up. “What?”
“A choice.”
Hope again.
Dangerous thing.
“You sign the divorce as it stands,” I said, tapping the first page, “and you walk away without further consequences.”
His brow furrowed.
“And if I don’t?”
I slid the second document forward.
His name.
Legal language.
Numbers that didn’t just suggest damage—they proved it.
“Then we continue,” I said. “And this becomes more than a divorce.”
He stared at the page, the color draining slowly from his face.
“You’d sue me?” he asked.
“I’d hold you accountable,” I corrected.
“For what? Using money in our marriage?”
“For using money that wasn’t yours to fund a second one.”
That did it.
The last piece of denial fell away.
“This will destroy me,” he said quietly.
I met his gaze without hesitation.
“You should have thought about that before you planned a future with someone else using my past.”
His hands tightened slightly on the edge of the table.
For a long moment, he said nothing.
Then, finally—
“…She doesn’t know,” he admitted.
I raised an eyebrow.
“About what?”
“Any of this,” he said. “The accounts. The house. The… situation.”
I let out a small breath.
Of course she didn’t.
“You might want to tell her,” I said. “Before she finds out the way I did.”
He nodded slowly, still staring at the papers.
“Does she know you’re still married?” I added.
He didn’t answer.
That was answer enough.
I straightened.
“You have forty-eight hours,” I said. “After that, I stop being generous.”
He looked up at me, something unreadable in his expression now.
“You’ve changed,” he said.
I almost smiled.
“No,” I replied. “I’ve been paying attention.”
Then I turned and walked out, leaving him alone with the consequences he had spent years pretending wouldn’t exist.
—
What Mauricio still didn’t understand…
Was that I wasn’t the only person whose life he had just dismantled.
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