…”a private investigator. You hired someone to follow your wife.”
Vanessa turned her phone toward me. The photos showed my husband, Paul, sitting in a café across from a woman with short gray hair and a briefcase. In the next picture, she handed him a folder. Vanessa had looked her up. Her name was Diane Foster, licensed investigator.
“I thought she was another girlfriend,” Vanessa said. “Then I recognized her from her website.”
My lawyer later obtained the investigator’s report through the divorce process. Paul had hired her two months earlier to find “anything” he could use against me: an affair, money problems, a drinking habit. She found nothing, because there was nothing to find. Her final report said I went to work, went to the gym and visited my mother on Sundays. Paul had underlined one line in red: “Subject appears to be meeting a lawyer.” He’d figured out I was preparing for divorce and was trying to get ahead of me.
His plan had been to move money out of our accounts before I filed. The screenshots Vanessa had sent me showed transfers to a new account in his brother’s name.
At the dinner table, Paul had nothing left to say. He stood up, knocked over his chair and left. Our guests sat in stunned silence. Then my sister calmly asked the waiter for another bottle of wine.
My lawyer filed for divorce on Monday. The judge froze the accounts, ordered the transferred money returned and noted Paul’s attempts to hide assets in the final settlement. I kept the house.
Vanessa and I became unlikely friends. She was devastated at first, but she told me that helping me was the only thing that made her feel less foolish. We have lunch once a month. We never talk about Paul.
On what would have been our sixteenth anniversary, she sent me a single screenshot: a reservation for two at the same restaurant, under her name. “Let’s ruin this place for him forever,” she wrote. We did. The dessert was excellent.
