The coffee shop was three blocks from my office, the kind of place where the tables were bolted to the floor and nobody stayed longer than twenty minutes. Maggie was already there when I walked in, sitting in the back corner with her legal pad and a cup that looked like it had been refilled three times.
I slid into the chair across from her. My hands were still shaking.
"Tell me," she said.
So I did. I told her about the pearls and the La Perla and the face cream on Camryn's heels. I told her about the Instagram posts and the jewelry box left open and my own bedroom door that didn't belong to me anymore. And then I told her what I'd heard through the crack in the door at one in the morning — the daughter's name, the mortgage, the policy, the pass.
Maggie didn't interrupt. She took notes in shorthand I couldn't read, and when I finally stopped talking, she set her pen down and looked at me like she was deciding how much truth I could handle.
"Washington's a one-party consent state," she said. "That means you can record any conversation you're part of without telling the other person. Chain of custody matters. Time stamps matter. You keep everything on your phone, you back it up somewhere he can't touch, and you do not — Milena, look at me — you do not confront him until the case is airtight."
"I wasn't going to—"
"Yes, you were." Her voice was flat. "You were going to walk in there tonight and ask him what the hell he meant. And if you do that, if you tip him off now, you die on Snoqualmie Pass and no one ever knows why."
I felt the air go out of my chest.
"So we build the case," Maggie said. "Ninety days. Maybe less if we're lucky. I'll pull records — marriage, birth, insurance. You keep doing exactly what you've been doing. You smile. You go to work. You record every word. And when we have enough, we bury him."
I nodded. I didn't trust my voice yet.
Maggie reached across the table and put her hand over mine. "You're going to be okay," she said. "But you have to be smart first."
I left the coffee shop with a list of instructions on my phone and a timeline that felt like holding my breath underwater. Ninety days. I could do ninety days.
I made it six.
The fight started over a credit card statement.
I came home on a Wednesday to find a charge for $4,200 at a spa in Bellevue. I pulled up the details on my phone and walked into the kitchen, where Dario was making himself a sandwich like he hadn't just spent my quarterly bonus on someone else's skin.
"What's this?" I held up the screen.
He glanced at it. Shrugged. "Camryn needed a day. She's been stressed."
"She's been stressed." I set the phone down on the counter, very carefully. "Dario, that's four thousand dollars."
"And you make that in a day," he said. "What's your point?"
"My point is you didn't ask."
He turned to face me fully now, and something shifted in his expression, something I'd seen before but never named. "I shouldn't have to ask," he said. "She's family. Or does family not count when it costs you something?"
"She's not—" I stopped myself. Maggie's voice in my head. Do not confront him. "She's not the one married to me, Dario. You are."
He moved so fast I didn't see it coming. One second he was standing by the sink, and the next his hand was on my shoulder and he shoved, hard, and my hip cracked into the edge of the marble counter. Pain shot up my side. I put my hand down to catch myself and felt something warm and wet.
I looked down. There was blood running from my palm where the counter edge had split the skin open, a clean line from my thumb to my wrist.
Dario stared at it for half a second. Then he picked up my purse from the chair, pulled out my AmEx, and walked toward the door.
"Where are you going?"
"Out," he said. "Camryn deserves something nice after putting up with you."
The door slammed. I stood there with blood dripping onto the white tile, and I thought, very clearly: He didn't even check if I was okay.
I went to the bathroom. I ran my hand under cold water until it stopped shaking. I wrapped it in gauze from the cabinet under the sink, the one I'd stocked myself because Dario never remembered to buy first aid supplies. Then I stood in front of the mirror, unwrapped it, and took three photographs of the gash across my palm with the marble counter visible in the background.
I sent them to Maggie with no text.
Then I pulled up my credit card account and watched the charges roll in.
$12,000 at Nordstrom. $18,000 at Cartier. $35,000 at a boutique I'd never heard of. The numbers climbed like a scoreboard. By the time they came home four hours later, he'd spent $85,000.
I was still sitting at the kitchen island with a bag of frozen peas on my hand when they walked in. Camryn was wearing a new coat — camel cashmere, the kind I'd looked at once and decided was too much. She saw me and her face did that thing, that flicker, and then she smiled.
"Milena, you're still up."
Dario set his keys on the counter. He looked at my hand, at the blood soaked through the gauze, and his face stayed perfectly blank. "You should've been more careful," he said.
Then he turned to me, and his voice dropped into something quiet and easy, the voice he used when he wanted me to know he was serious without anyone else hearing it. "If you cancel that card," he said, "or if you say one word about today at your office, I will show up there myself. And I will tell everyone what you did to my sister."
I looked at him. I looked at Camryn in her new coat. I nodded.
"Okay," I said.
They went upstairs. I heard the bedroom door close — my bedroom door — and I sat there in the kitchen with my hand throbbing and my phone in my lap.
I opened my evidence log. I created a new tab and labeled it Financial Abuse. I pasted in the credit card statement screenshot. Then I went back to the photos of my hand and added a timestamp and a note: *Shoved into counter during argument over unauthorized charges. No apology. No medical assistance offered.*
I saved it. I backed it up. And then I sat there in the dark and let myself feel, just for a minute, how much I hated him.
Ninety days, Maggie had said.
I could do this.
I had to.
