My Husband’s Mistress Received a Gift With My Name on It
Chapter 3
THEME: FONT SIZE: 18px"How can I help you tonight?"
"I need to know whether there are any accounts open under my name that aren't showing in my online profile."
There was a pause.
"Are you concerned about identity theft?"
I stared through the windshield at my house.
Through the front windows, I could see the Christmas tree.
People were moving inside.
The party had continued.
"Yes," I said.
She verified my identity.
Name.
Date of birth.
Address.
The last four digits of my Social Security number.
Then she went quiet.
Not for long.
Maybe four seconds.
But long enough.
"Mrs. Whitmore?"
"Yes."
"I do see another account associated with your identity."
My fingers tightened around the phone.
"What kind of account?"
"A Visa Signature account."
"What are the last four digits?"
"4417."
The snow seemed to stop moving.
"When was it opened?"
"Fourteen months ago."
I closed my eyes.
Fourteen months.
"What's the balance?"
Another pause.
"I'm showing a current balance of sixty-eight thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars."
I stopped breathing.
"That's impossible."
"Mrs. Whitmore, if you believe you didn't open this account—"
"What is the mailing address?"
"I'm limited in what I can disclose until we complete additional verification."
"Is it my home?"
"No."
That single word chilled me more than the snow outside.
I completed every verification question she gave me.
Eventually she read the address.
It wasn't Sloane's.
It was Preston's office.
Whitmore Capital.
Thirty-first floor.
Downtown.
I looked toward the windows of my house again.
Inside, silhouettes moved between Christmas lights.
My husband had not merely purchased an eighteen-thousand-dollar bracelet for his mistress.
He had purchased it with a credit card opened in my name.
And the bracelet wasn't even close to the card's full balance.
I heard myself ask the next question.
"What else was charged to it?"
The representative hesitated.
"We can begin the fraud process and provide statements once—"
"Please."
Maybe she heard something in my voice.
Maybe she'd had this conversation before with other women who discovered their lives had been quietly dismantled on paper.
She gave me recent transactions.
Bellamy & Rowe.
A luxury furniture store.
A hotel in Boston.
A boutique in Manhattan.
A florist.
A payment to a property-management company.
I wrote everything down.
The property company appeared three times.
Each payment was almost six thousand dollars.
"What is that?" I whispered.
"I only have the merchant name."
"What's the name?"
She told me.
I searched it while she was still speaking.
The company managed luxury residential buildings.
One of them was seventeen minutes from Preston's office.
A glass tower where the cheapest apartment rented for more than five thousand dollars a month.
I knew that building.
Three months earlier, Sloane had posted a photograph from its rooftop terrace.
I'd seen it because Eleanor had shown me while complaining that young women shared too much of their lives online.
I remembered Sloane standing beneath the city lights.
Champagne in her hand.
Caption:
Finally feels like home.
My stomach turned.
The bracelet was not the first thing Preston had bought her with my identity.
It was simply the first thing he had been arrogant enough to place in my hands.
The fraud representative asked whether I wanted the account frozen.
"Yes."
"Immediately?"
I stared at the house.
Preston was somewhere inside.
Probably wondering whether I was crying.
"Immediately."
She explained the next steps.
Affidavit.
Investigation.
Credit bureaus.
Possibly police.
I barely heard her.
Because one question had begun pounding inside my head.
If there was one card I didn't know about...
what else had Preston put in my name?
I ended the call.
Then I opened a credit monitoring service.
It took less than ten minutes.
The report loaded.
My mouth went dry.
There wasn't one unfamiliar account.
There were four.
The credit card.
A personal line of credit.
A second card issued by another bank.
And a loan opened eleven months earlier.
Together, they represented more money than I could process while sitting in a freezing car with Christmas music still faintly playing inside my house.
I scrolled until I found the total.
$386,000.
Debt.
In my name.
My husband had spent Christmas evening waiting for me to discover another woman was wearing my bracelet.
He had no idea I had just discovered I was financing the life he planned to have without me.
And for the first time that night, I cried.
Not because of Sloane.
Not because of the diamonds.
Not even because his family had watched.
I cried because I suddenly understood how little of my own life I could trust.
Then I wiped my face.
Saved every document.
Changed every password I could think of.
And drove away.
I did not go back inside.
May you like
By midnight, the bracelet had stopped mattering.
By one in the morning, I understood that my marriage was over.
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