Chapter 10 - His Mother’s Gambling Debt Was the Hiding Place
The truth was not that Daniel had sacrificed our savings to rescue Margaret.
That story had contained enough truth to survive.
Margaret did have a gambling addiction.
Daniel did pay debts for her.
But after reading my divorce consultation, he began using those payments differently.
He transferred additional marital money through Margaret.
Some went to her real debts.
The rest moved through Northstar.
The condo.
Investment accounts.
Legal fees.
Assets technically held by his mother.
His plan was not brilliant.
Nor was it guaranteed to work.
Family courts have discovery.
Transfers can be traced.
Fraudulent dissipation of marital assets can have consequences.
But Daniel did not need a flawless plan.
He needed time.
If I froze the account the next morning, transfers stopped.
Records were exposed.
Questions began.
That was why the argument changed so violently when I said I would freeze our money.
Not simply because I had insulted his mother.
I had accidentally put my hand on the door behind which Daniel had been moving pieces of our marriage.
Three earlier clues finally aligned.
His knowledge of my lawyer.
The structured transfers larger than Margaret’s actual losses.
And his strange words:
Half my money.
The shove had not been a planned attempt to kill me.
Nothing we found supported that.
That mattered.
It was worse in another way.
Daniel became violent in a moment when losing control of money, marriage and children felt intolerable to him.
Then, after I fell, he did what he had been doing financially for months.
He managed the damage.
Margaret’s job had always been to hold things for him.
Money.
Property.
Secrets.
That night, he asked her to hold one more:
May you like
She fell.
And she did.
