Alejandro’s voice filled the courtroom when the clerk played the audio transcript from my phone: Sign the custody transfer before the birth, Elena, or I’ll make sure the court thinks you’re insane. I own the people who decide what mothers deserve.
A murmur moved through the room.
Alejandro slammed his hand on the table. “That’s edited.”
“It was authenticated,” I said.
Ricardo narrowed his eyes. “By whom?”
I looked at him calmly. “By the same forensic lab your firm uses in corporate fraud cases.”
That was the first clue that they had targeted the wrong woman.
Before I became Alejandro’s wife, before Doña Victoria taught her friends to call me “the charity girl,” I had been a forensic accountant for the state attorney’s office. I knew how powerful men hid things. I knew how lawyers laundered threats through paperwork. I knew the difference between a mistake and a pattern.
The black tabs were financial records.
Alejandro had moved marital assets into three shell companies after I announced my pregnancy. He had paid a private investigator to follow me to therapy. He had transferred fifty thousand dollars to a clinic administrator two days before a false psychiatric summary appeared in Ricardo’s custody filing.
The judge’s jaw tightened.
