Cael Mercer knew things he shouldn't have known. That was the first thing I understood about him. He knew about the transfer documents. He knew about Ethan's lawyer. He knew that today was the day everything was supposed to change.

I let him in. I made more coffee. I sat across from him at my kitchen table and I studied him the way I had learned, in my previous life, to study people who arrived with information and agendas.

He told me he was an investor. That he had been tracking Ashford Holdings for two years. That he had discovered, through his own research, that Ethan had been systematically positioning himself to take control of the company — not just through the marriage, but through a network of shell companies and proxy shareholders that had been building for years before I ever met my husband.

I asked him how he knew about today specifically. He paused. Then he said: "I have a source inside Ethan's legal team. Someone who has been documenting everything and waiting for the right moment."

I looked at him. He was telling the truth — I could feel it, the way you can feel truth when you've spent three years learning to read a man who lied about everything. But he was also not telling me everything.