“There would have been no point because he would have just lied and made me feel like I was being paranoid and hysterical,” I answered.
The affair was just the final proof that our marriage was nothing more than a convenient mask for him to wear while he chased his own desires. He wanted a respectable wife at home to maintain his image while he did whatever he wanted behind my back.
“He is going to tell everyone that you have lost your mind,” Silas warned as we turned onto a back road heading toward the mountains. “He will try to paint himself as the victim of a wife who just snapped for no reason.”
“Let him tell whatever lies he wants,” I said. “By the time he realizes the extent of what I have actually taken, I will be far beyond his reach.”
Silas looked at me with a new level of respect in his eyes.
“You were always the smartest person in our class, Cassandra,” he said. “It is a shame you never got to practice law because you would have been terrifying in a courtroom.”
“I might still decide to do that one day,” I replied.
As we drove further away from the life I knew, I thought about the digital vault I had filled with copies of his forged documents and bank statements. I had been methodical about gathering evidence of his fraud, not because I wanted revenge, but because I needed a shield.
“We are almost at the safe house,” Silas said as we approached a small cabin tucked away in a thick forest of pine trees.
The property was owned by a shell company Silas had created years ago for his own privacy. It was the perfect place for Cassandra to disappear so that a new woman could finally be born.
