Read Online And One Last Thing... by Molly Harper - Free Book Online Page B

your marriage?”
    “Um, no. I know this is going to sound pretty cliché, but Mike took care of all of our finances. He was an accountant. I trusted him. It just made sense at the time.”
    “Let me guess, when it came to loans, bills, and tax returns, you just signed where he told you to?”
    I nodded, staring at the twisting hands in my lap.
    “Don’t worry about the records, Lacey. The discovery process makes my clerk feel useful. The first thing we’re going to do is make sure that Mike’s house is in order, that there’s nothing illegal or unethical going on. And if he’s up to something illegal or unethical, we’ll do what we can to make sure you aren’t liable for any of it. Then we use it as leverage.”
    I chewed my lip as I considered that. “As much as I would relish the idea of Mike showering with his back against a prison wall, I don’t think you’re going to find anything but aboveboard business with Mike. He’s ambitious and materialistic, but also dull as a box of mud and straight as an arrow. Frankly, I didn’t think he had the guile to carry off an affair.”
    “You’d be surprised,” Samantha said.
    “I’d really rather not be surprised again,” I muttered.
    “The fun part is that we can ask for every piece of financial information Mike has handled since your wedding. You have every right to see it and searching for it will be a gigantic pain in the ass for Mike and his lawyer. And if you want to have some real fun, we can demand that every cent Mike spent ‘entertaining’ Beebee be paid back to the marital pot. We might even get the judge to consider her salary part of his maintenance of the affair. We’ll have my associate go over every receipt and credit card charge, pick out all expenditures, like two thousand dollars spent at a jewelry store or three days at a resort. If you don’t remember getting a diamond anklet or a weekend getaway in Hot Springs, then we assume that Mike spent that money on Beebee, and not, say, his mom.”
    “Yes, let’s do that, please. But you should know his mom is also a strong possibility.”
    “Ew.”
    I nodded. “Exactly.”
    We talked for another hour or so and I found it oddly therapeutic, even if Samantha mostly kept her head down to take a copious amount of notes. She nodded. She grunted. She occasionally muttered something in Latin.
    We finally came to the subject of the newsletter, how I’d found the information, how I’d written it. When I told her I’d forwarded the actual messages to my account, her smile was a mile wide. Samantha assured me that even if Mike had deleted the e-mails from his account, that her forensic computer analyst would be able to prove the messages were sent from Mike’s IP address at work, where I didn’t have access.
    Sammy went on to explain that the lawsuit would be handled separately, but she would handle both cases. Apparently, in the course of her divorce court experience, she’d handled quite a few defamation suits - which made me feel a little bit better. She assured me that as long as information in the newsletter was proven to be true, there was nothing the court could do to prevent the publication or punish the author.
    “We shouldn’t have a problem then, because it was all true,” I told her. “Everything I wrote was based on finding those e-mails. Wouldn’t the pictures alone be enough to just cancel this whole lawsuit thing?”
    “Well, no, you would have to respond to the suit either way, particularly since Mike and Beebee’s complaint states that the e-mails were spam and Mike has no idea who they’re from. They’re claiming that the woman in the photos isn’t Beebee, that this is a horrible case of a nosy wife who found bad information while snooping and wreaked havoc with it. They’re saying you’ve defamed both of their characters, have damaged Mike’s reputation/ earning potential, and harmed Beebee’s standing in the community.”
    “Oh, what standing in the