Chapter 3 - The Secret in the Floorboards
Wesley let go of my arm as if scorched by boiling water.
“Officer!” Eleanor rushed forward, her voice dripping with practiced distress. “Thank goodness you’re here! My daughter-in-law has locked my son out of his own home. She’s unstable! She threw dishes at his head earlier today!”
Deputy Miller didn't even look at her. He looked at me, then down at the red fingerprint marks blooming on my pale wrist.
“Mr. Ward,” Miller said in a flat, dangerous monotone. “Take your hands off the lady and step onto the public sidewalk. Do it right now.”
Wesley took three stiff paces backward, holding his hands up in a display of mock innocence. “Deputy, this is a civil dispute. We’re legally married.”
“I have the temporary protective order right here,” Miller said, pulling a folded document from his clipboard. “Signed by Judge Holbrook twenty minutes ago. Mr. Ward, you are prohibited from approaching within five hundred feet of Nina Vance, her residence, or her place of employment. You have ten minutes to collect clothing and toiletries under my supervision. Everything else remains disputed property until probate or family court handles it.”
“Probate?” Wesley choked on the word. “We aren’t divorcing!”
“We aren’t divorcing, Wesley,” I corrected him calmly, stepping past him into my own foyer. “We’re annulling. On the grounds of fraudulent concealment.”
Wesley tried to push past Miller, his face dark with fury. “What fraudulent concealment? What nonsense did Iris tell you?”
“She didn’t tell me anything about your finances,” I replied, watching his eyes narrow. “She just told me you had a safe.”
That hit him harder than an electric shock. Wesley actually staggered back half a step.
I turned on my heel and walked straight toward the guest bedroom—the room Wesley had insisted on keeping locked as his ‘private study’ while he supposedly worked from home as an independent logistics consultant.
The door was locked, but Dave had the cylinder picked in less than forty seconds.
Inside, the room was strangely bare. A desk, a single monitor, and a stack of shipping boxes. But under the heavy oriental rug Wesley had brought from his bachelor apartment, the hardwood floorboards didn't sit flush.
I dropped to my knees, pulled back the rug, and lifted the two loose oak planks.
There, tucked between the subfloor joists, sat a steel fireproof document box and a leather-bound ledger.
Deputy Miller stood in the doorway, watching quietly. “Everything okay in there, Nina?”
“More than okay, Deputy,” I said, opening the unlocked metal box.
Inside were four different driver’s licenses, each featuring Wesley’s face under slight variations of his name: *Wesley Ward, Wesley Vance-Ward, Wesley E. Ward, and Wesley Thomas.*
Beneath the IDs lay a notarized real estate power of attorney form—already forged with my signature—granting Wesley the legal authority to borrow against the equity of my house. The date at the bottom was tomorrow.
He hadn’t married me for love, companionship, or even control.
May you like
He had married me to take out a $200,000 cash-out refinance on my home to pay off his hidden debts.
***