Chapter 3 - FOUR YEARS OF MONEY I NEVER KNEW EXISTED
I called an attorney before I went home.
Her name was Rebecca Sloan.
She told me not to empty accounts.
Not to destroy anything.
Not to confront Mark about the financial documents until we had preserved what was legally available to me.
That afternoon, we started with public records.
M&B Property Strategies owned two properties.
One was a condominium twenty minutes from Mark’s office.
Purchased three years earlier.
The second was a lake house.
Mark had told me that lake house belonged to “an investor from Dallas.”
We had stayed there once.
I had slept in the master bedroom.
Brenda had apparently chosen the furniture.
I felt physically sick.
Then Rebecca found the mortgage documents.
The down payment on the condo included money transferred from an investment account.
My investment account.
Not directly.
It moved through two other accounts first.
But the timing and amounts lined up closely enough for a forensic accountant to begin tracing.
I stared at the records.
“That account was supposed to pay for retirement.”
Rebecca nodded.
“How much is missing?”
“We don’t know yet.”
It took three weeks to answer.
Approximately $640,000 in marital funds had been routed into investments, properties, or accounts connected to Mark and Brenda without my knowledge.
That did not automatically mean every dollar had been illegally taken.
Marriage and jointly owned assets make financial questions more complicated than television revenge stories.
But Mark had hidden them.
That fact was not complicated.
Then came the home-equity line.
$425,000.
Secured against the house Mark and I had nearly finished paying off.
I stared at the signature.
Mine.
Except I had never signed it.
Rebecca asked:
“Have you ever electronically authorized a HELOC?”
“No.”
“Did Mark have access to your digital signature?”
“Yes.”
For years, he handled our property paperwork.
He always said:
“Why make both of us deal with boring forms?”
I used to think that was love.
May you like
Now the sentence sounded completely different.
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