PART 2 — THE WOMAN IN THE HOSPITAL
I didn’t sleep that night.
I sat in my car outside the hospital with the recording playing over and over.
Paige.
The little boy.
The apartment.
The company guarantees.
My husband had been planning to use my name, my reputation, and my assets to protect himself while building another life behind my back.
But one sentence bothered me more than everything else.
“Jacqueline will never find out.”
I had spent seven years believing Alistair was simply a private man.
Now I realized he wasn’t private.
He was hiding an entire life.
At 6:17 the next morning, Gavin called.
“I found Paige.”
“Who is she?”
There was a pause.
“You’re not going to like this.”
“Tell me.”
“Her full name is Paige Whitmore. She’s twenty-six. She owns a small consulting company that has received several large transfers from an account connected to your husband.”
My stomach tightened.
“How much?”
“Just under $900,000 over the last eighteen months.”
I closed my eyes.
“That’s impossible.”
“I haven’t finished.”
He sent me several documents.
I opened the first one.
It was a property record.
An apartment in downtown Minneapolis.
The owner wasn’t Paige.
It was Alistair.
But the mailing address was Paige’s.
Then Gavin sent me another document.
A birth certificate.
Father: Alistair Finch.
The mother’s name was Paige Whitmore.
The child’s name was Matthew Whitmore.
Three years old.
I stared at the screen.
The boy in the hospital was Alistair’s son.
My husband had a secret child.
But Gavin wasn’t finished.
“There is something else,” he said.
“What?”
“Your name appears on a company loan application.”
I opened the document.
My heart stopped.
My signature was at the bottom.
A personal guarantee for $2.4 million.
“I never signed this.”
“I know.”
I zoomed in.
The signature looked almost exactly like mine.
Almost.
But after years as a lawyer, I knew the difference.
It was a forgery.
Someone had copied my signature.
And then I noticed something even worse.
The document was dated three months earlier.
The same week Alistair had asked me to “update some corporate paperwork.”
I had trusted him.
I had signed nothing without reading it.
Or at least, I thought I hadn’t.
PART 3 — THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH
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