I went upstairs without saying a word.
In the back of my walk-in closet, behind my winter coats, there’s a small fireproof safe. Martin knew it was there. He thought I kept my grandmother’s jewelry in it.
I spun the dial and took out a thick blue folder labeled HOUSEHOLD RECEIPTS.
Inside were the bank transfers, the hotel records, the expense reports, and the Cartier receipt. There were printed copies of Martin’s emails promising company shares to “our children,” and security camera stills from the lobby of the Lake Shore Drive penthouse.
And there was a copy of the Voss Marital Trust, all forty-one pages, with page nineteen flagged with a yellow sticky note in my handwriting.
The forfeiture clause had been triggered three different ways. Martin had promised company shares to an extramarital partner in writing. He had used company money for Clara’s apartment, car, and jewelry. And now he wanted to put Clara’s children in the trust as his heirs, children who could not be his.
If he’d known what I’d written on page nineteen, he never would have said a word about an amended trust. He’d never read it.
But the cruelest clue wasn’t in the folder. It was a photograph tucked into the back pocket, one I’d taken myself from across the street on a cold morning three weeks earlier, sitting in my car outside Clara’s building.
In it, a man was walking out of the lobby with Clara, pushing a stroller. He leaned down and kissed her. Not a friendly kiss on the cheek, but a long one on the mouth, with his hand on the back of her neck.
The man was Martin’s younger brother, Adrian Voss, the chief financial officer of Voss Meridian.
On the stroller handle, a hospital bracelet still dangled from a pink ribbon, the kind they put on newborns at Prentice Women’s Hospital. When I zoomed in on my phone, I could read the name printed on it.
Baby Girl Voss-Hayes. Father: A. Voss.
Martin hadn’t just been cheated on. He’d been chosen as the fool, because his ego made him easy.
I sat on the closet floor and looked at that photograph for a long time.
Then I took out my phone and called a number I hadn’t dialed in eight years.
“Margaret,” I said, when a sleepy voice answered. “It’s Evelyn Marsh. I’m sorry to call so late. I need your help.”
Margaret Kowalczyk was my mentor at the law firm when I was twenty-six. She was sixty-four now and a senior partner, and she still had the sharpest legal mind I’ve ever met. When I left the firm to marry Martin, she took me to lunch and said one thing.
“Keep your bar license active, Evelyn. Pay your dues every year. Do your continuing education. Don’t ever let it lapse.”
“Why?” I asked. “I’m getting married.”
“That’s why,” she said.
I’d paid my dues every year for nine years, $575 annually to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, plus thirty hours of continuing legal education every two years. Martin thought it was a silly hobby.
Margaret met me at her office on Wacker Drive at seven the next morning. She read every page in my blue folder while drinking black coffee, and when she finished, she took off her reading glasses.
“Evelyn, you wrote a beautiful trust,” she said. “And your husband just walked straight into it.”
“I didn’t write it for Martin,” I said. “I wrote it for strangers.”
“That’s what makes it work,” Margaret said. “A rule that only applies to strangers isn’t a rule.”
She went through it with me line by line. The forfeiture clause in the Voss Marital Trust was enforceable as a contract between spouses. Both of us had signed it with independent counsel present. Martin’s lawyer at the time had reviewed it, and Heinrich had witnessed it. Martin’s written promises to give company shares to Clara triggered the first provision, his use of company funds for her expenses triggered the second, and any attempt to add her children to the trust as his heirs would trigger the third.
“Under the clause, Martin’s beneficial interest in the marital assets passes to you,” Margaret said. “Not the company shares outright. Those stay in trust. But you’d become the sole beneficiary, and as successor trustee, you’d vote those shares. Fifty-four percent of Voss Meridian.”
I stared at her.
“I’d control the company,” I said.
“You’d control the company,” Margaret said. “At least until a court tells you otherwise. And I’ve read this trust. No court is going to tell you otherwise.”
Then she turned to the photograph of Adrian and Clara, and her face changed.
“This part worries me more,” she said. “If Adrian is the CFO, and he’s the father of those children, and Clara’s expenses were going through the company’s books, then he’s the one approving the invoices. Martin’s been spending company money on his mistress. Fine. That’s a breach of his fiduciary duty, and he’ll have to pay it back. But a CFO in a relationship with the CEO’s mistress, signing off on her expenses?” She tapped the photo. “That’s not an affair, Evelyn. That’s a scheme.”
“Martin is the bait,” I said slowly.
“Martin is the bait,” Margaret agreed. “We need a forensic accountant. Today.”
