Chapter 3: The First Trace
The next morning, Maya asked the nurse for her phone.
Her hands still trembled when she unlocked it, but her mind was clear. She opened the banking app first. The joint account she shared with Eric showed a transfer of $23,000 that had cleared the day before the shower. Another transfer of $8,500 had gone out two weeks earlier to an account she didn’t recognize.
She screenshotted everything.
Then she opened the folder she kept for work — encrypted, backed up to the cloud. She logged into the small consulting portal she used for clients and began running quiet searches on the account numbers she could access.
Eric had always been careless with passwords. He used the same ones for everything.
By afternoon, Maya had found three more transfers over the past four months, all to accounts linked to Diane’s name or companies Maya had never heard of. The amounts were smaller — $2,000 here, $3,500 there — but they added up.
She saved every record.
When the nurse came in to check her vitals, Maya asked, “Can I see my daughter today?”
“They’re bringing her down in a little while,” the nurse said gently. “She’s stable, but still on oxygen.”
Maya nodded. She waited until the nurse left, then opened a new note on her phone and began typing names, dates, and amounts in a clean list.
She was still weak. Her body hurt in places she hadn’t known could hurt. But her mind worked the way it always had — precise, patient, relentless.
May you like
They had thought she would be too broken to notice.
They were wrong.
