I dumped the contents of my tote bag onto the passenger seat. Bundles of crisp, sequential hundred-dollar bills stared back at me. A fortune to some. A death sentence to me.
My hands shook so badly I could barely unlock my phone. My thumb hovered over the screen. Call the police. But Maria’s warning echoed in my ears. Eleanor’s brother was a powerful man in Dallas law enforcement. If I called them, reporting a murder plot with nothing but a stolen trash bag and a photocopy of a death certificate, the report would land on his desk within hours. Andrew would be tipped off. The trap would snap shut, tighter this time.
I needed to disappear, but not the way they wanted.
First, I powered down my phone and popped the SIM card out, snapping the tiny piece of plastic in half before tossing it out the window into a storm drain. They wouldn’t be able to track my GPS.
Next, I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. The pale, exhausted woman looking back did indeed look drained by five years of a toxic, gaslighting marriage. “Because this marriage is draining the life out of you,” Eleanor had said. She hadn’t been offering sympathy; she had been writing my eulogy.
“You think I’m weak,” I whispered to the mirror, tears finally spilling over my eyelids, hot and furious. “You think because I stayed quiet while you ignored me, because I gave up my career to be a perfect Dallas housewife, that I don’t have teeth. You’re wrong.“
I counted out $5,000 from the stack and shoved it into my pocket. The rest of the $95,000 I stuffed into a spare duffel bag Maria kept in the trunk. I walked into the Walmart, bought a cheap, prepaid burner phone, a pair of heavy-duty scissors, a box of pitch-black hair dye, and a oversized baseball cap.
In the filthy bathroom of a gas station three miles down the road, I hacked off my long, chestnut hair—the hair Andrew had always insisted I keep long because it made me look “elegant.” I dyed the remaining blunt bob a harsh, midnight black. When I rinsed it out and looked in the mirror, Valerie Vance was gone. In her place was a stranger with hollow eyes and a dangerous, burning rage.
For the next three days, I became a ghost.
I checked into a seedy, cash-only motel on the outskirts of Fort Worth under a fake name, paying the clerk a hundred-dollar bill to skip the ID check. I spent every waking second on my burner phone, using the motel’s unsecured Wi-Fi to dig into my own life.
What I found made my blood run cold.
Andrew’s family logistics company, Vance Enterprises, which my father had heavily invested in before he passed away, was on the brink of a massive merger with a European conglomerate. The merger was worth upwards of eighty million dollars. But there was a catch in my father’s original investment contract: if Andrew and I divorced, fifty percent of the company’s physical assets and real estate—including our mansion—would revert entirely to me.
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