Po 14 latach i dwójce dzieci moja żona zażądała domu, samochodu i firmy, więc oddałem jej wszystko

I grabbed his collar and shoved him against the wall.

I’m not a violent man. I’ve never thrown a punch in anger in my life.

But in that moment, I wanted to do something I’d regret forever.

“Get out,” I said, my voice low and deadly. “Get out now.”

He left. He didn’t even look at Nora on his way out.

Nora started crying—real tears, fake tears, I couldn’t tell anymore.

“Donnie, please,” she sobbed. “I was lonely. You’re never home. You don’t pay attention to me. I needed someone who made me feel wanted.”

“I worked seventy hours a week to give you everything you asked for,” I said. “The house, the cars, the vacations. And this is how you repay me?”

“Maybe if you were here more,” she snapped, wiping her face like she was irritated at the mess, “maybe if you tried harder—”

“Tried harder?” I cut in. “I gave you fourteen years, Nora. I gave you everything I had.”

She looked at me like I was boring her.

“Well,” she said, cold as a faucet turned off, “it wasn’t enough.”

I left the house that night and drove to my mother’s place.

I sat on her porch until the sun came up, listening to distant traffic and the occasional train horn cutting through the dark.

I didn’t cry.

I didn’t scream.

I just sat there and tried to figure out how I’d missed something so obvious for so long.

A week later, Nora filed for divorce.

But she didn’t just want out.

She wanted everything.

The house. Both vehicles. Full custody of Maisie and Theo. And Sutler and Sons Plumbing—the company my father built and I spent my adult life growing.

Her lawyer sent over demands that made my stomach turn. She claimed she’d been an unpaid partner. She said she deserved compensation for years of “sacrifice.”

Hugh called me the same day, furious.

“Donnie, this is extortion,” he said. “She’s not entitled to the business. We can fight this.”

“Good,” I said. “Then let’s build our case.”

“I’ll start today,” he said.

“Not yet,” I told him. “There’s something I need to check first.”

That night, I went to the office.

I pulled every company record I could find from the last few years. Vendor files. Payment logs. Internal ledgers. Everything that could tell a story if you stared long enough.

I spread it all across my father’s old desk and started reading.

By midnight, I found the first fake vendor charge.

By two in the morning, I’d found more.

By sunrise, my hands were stained with printer ink and my eyes felt like sandpaper, and I was staring at a pattern so clear it made me nauseous.

Hundreds of thousands gone. Fake vendors. Shell companies. Materials that never existed.

And over and over, on the approvals that let it happen, was Nora’s name.

Nora wasn’t just cheating on me.

She was robbing me.

And she thought she was going to walk away clean.

I sat in my mother’s kitchen the next morning with the folder open in front of me, the kind of silence in the room that feels heavier than noise.

My first instinct was to confront her. To throw the pages at her and watch her panic. To call the cops and blow the whole thing up right there.

But I stopped myself.

Nora was smart. Not wise—smart.

She’d planned this. If I tipped her off, she’d scramble. She’d blame Vance. She’d destroy evidence. She’d twist the story until she looked like the victim.

I needed a different approach.

I called Boyd.

He came over after his shift, still smelling like smoke, still wearing that steady look firefighters carry like armor. I handed him a beer and slid the folder across the table.

“What’s this?” he asked.