Chapter 9 - THE DINNER BEFORE THE WEDDING
The anonymous person who sent the red-folder photograph finally identified herself.
Sarah Kline.
Not wife.
Former fiancée.
Three years before me.
She never married Julian because she overheard something the evening before their wedding.
Victoria, Julian, and a financial adviser were discussing Sarah’s inheritance from her grandmother.
They assumed she was upstairs.
She wasn't.
She heard Victoria say:
“Once the wedding is done, stop asking permission. She'll be family.”
Julian replied:
“She'll fight.”
Victoria:
“Only at first.”
Sarah left before sunrise.
Julian later told me Sarah cheated.
She hadn't.
Sarah kept texts.
One from Julian:
You humiliated me after everything Mom planned for us.
Another:
Marriage requires trust, and trust means no secret money.
Sarah had $120,000 in inheritance.
They wanted that too.
Three women.
Amanda.
Sarah.
Me.
Different years.
Same machinery.
Then Sarah told me something worse.
“The night before your wedding, I saw Victoria.”
“Where?”
“At the Belmont Hotel.”
Our wedding hotel.
“What was she doing there?”
“Meeting Amanda.”
I turned to Amanda.
She looked shocked.
She had not met Victoria.
Then Sarah showed us a photograph.
Victoria at a restaurant table.
Across from a blonde woman.
Not Amanda.
Someone who resembled her from a distance.
Rachel identified her two days later.
A private investigator named Colleen Price.
Victoria had hired her to research me.
Employment.
Credit.
Family assets.
Ex-boyfriends.
My entire life had been commercially evaluated before the wedding.
But Colleen did one unexpected thing.
She kept copies.
And when subpoenaed, she produced the report.
On page seventeen:
Subject maintains separate emergency savings unknown to fiancé. Estimate unavailable.
Victoria had handwritten:
Find amount.
That was why she asked my mother about wedding money so aggressively.
They were not merely controlling.
May you like
They were hunting liquidity.
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