Chapter 10 - THE GIFT HE PAID FOR TWICE
By Monday, Cole Group had hired outside investigators.
Adrien’s personal office was instructed to preserve every message, invoice, and banking record related to Bennett Urban.
He sent me one text.
You’ve turned this into something it never needed to be.
I forwarded it to Naomi.
She replied to him.
My client did not create these records.
Three days later, the first banking response arrived.
The deposit account belonged to a management company controlled by Adrien.
It was not an account held for me.
It had received Bennett Urban’s four-hundred-thousand-dollar payment.
That money had then been applied against funds Adrien had already advanced to Clare.
I stared at the page.
“They were using my property deposit to repay him?”
“That is what these records indicate,” Naomi said.
“And the necklace?”
She put another document beside it.
The jeweler’s invoice had been submitted to Cole Group as an executive relationship expense.
The purchaser was Adrien.
The description was vague.
The amount wasn’t.
$1,200,000.
“So his company paid for her gift.”
“Initially. Investigators will determine how it was approved and whether he later reimbursed it.”
I wanted to laugh.
It came out as a breath.
He had told me he didn’t have time to arrange an anniversary present.
He had found time to make everyone else pay for Clare’s.
Naomi waited while I absorbed it.
Then she showed me the most painful document.
Not a bank record.
An email exchange.
Clare had written:
Will she agree?
Adrien’s answer:
She trusts me. I’ll handle it.
I read those six words until the letters blurred.
My trust had been part of the financing.
Naomi passed me a tissue.
“Do you want to stop for today?”
“No.”
I sat straighter.
“What happens next?”
“We pursue the property case. The board handles its investigation. You decide what you want from the divorce.”
“Divorce.”
“Yes.”
The word no longer felt like a cliff.
It felt like a door.
That evening, Adrien requested one meeting.
No property documents.
No lawyers negotiating reconciliation.
He wanted to apologize.
I agreed to twenty minutes in Naomi’s conference room.
When he walked in, he looked as though he hadn’t slept.
Before he sat down, he placed a small velvet box on the table.
May you like
I knew what was inside before he opened it.
The blue diamond had come back.
