The leaked documents and the divorce papers arrived in the same envelope. That was the part I did not understand until I was back in my own office, staring at both, with Desmond standing in the doorway not meeting my eyes. My wife had not simply found out about Seraphina.

Delphine, quiet, kind, steady Delphine, had spent four months building a case, because she had discovered the affair the way she discovered everything, quietly, and had realized while looking for evidence of Seraphina that I had been running my client entertainment accounts as a personal slush fund for five years. The jewelry. The flights. The shell-company penthouse.

All of it billed to accounts that belonged to investors, in violation of every fiduciary line I had ever crossed. She did not just leave me. She documented the fraud that funded my double life, and she sent it to the two places it would matter most, my lawyer and my managing partner, on the same afternoon.

Desmond helped her. That was the thing that finished me. The man who booked my lies for five years, who cleaned up after me without complaint, had liked my wife more than he feared me. When she came to him, he did not hesitate.

He gave her the account records, the flight itineraries, the jewelry receipts routed through client entertainment, all of it, because he had spent five years watching a good woman bring cookies to an office while her husband spent her marriage on someone else’s silk sheets, and he was done.

The firm did not survive the story attached to my name. My partners removed me within the week to protect what they could.