Chapter 1

Staring at the folder labeled "Study Materials" on my husband's C drive, I was shaking all over.

At first I'd only wondered what secret was worth locking away behind a password. I knew all his passwords. Our daughter's birthday. Our wedding anniversary. His screen-lock pattern. I assumed this one was the same.

It wasn't.

On the seventh try, our office suite number, it opened.

Photos. Him and a woman. Santa Fe. May 2019. The week our daughter turned one, the week he said he was away on business.

I clicked through them one by one. Thirty-seven of them. By the last one my hands had stopped shaking. They'd curled into fists on the desk, nails biting into my palms.

I closed it.

The desktop held only four icons. Project folders numbered by date, every one ending in _final. Back when I first met him, I'd thought a man who kept his computer this organized probably wasn't capable of anything monstrous.

I opened the recycle bin.

A dozen scrolls of the mouse and I still hadn't hit the bottom. Plane tickets. Quotes. A lease agreement. An insurance policy that had expired three years ago.

At the very bottom of the third page. A blue W icon.

The name: Divorce_Plan_v3_final.

v3. Final.

I stared at that blue W. When I came back to myself, my hand was no longer on the mouse.

The first page was a timeline. It started in the third year of our marriage. That was right after I'd quit my job at the paper, when I was sunk in the mire of postpartum depression, and my biggest achievement each day was dragging myself out of bed to mix our daughter's formula. He'd patted my back and told me to take it slow, no rush. Told me he had the house handled, that all I had to do was get better.

Fine. I was getting better. He was writing a plan.

Year three: transfer core assets into mother's name. Completed.

Year four: build up favorable conditions for custody of daughter（log wife's mood-swing cycles, medical records, medication list）. In progress.

Year five: obtain notarized property authorization from mother-in-law without her knowledge. Completed.

Year six: obtain written proof that wife gave up her career and has no independent income（including email exchanges, text screenshots）. Completed.

Year seven: complete asset-division simulation（three scenarios）. Pending execution.

I clicked through them one page at a time. Every page had a note attached. The tone in those note fields was the tone he used at home. Gentle, measured, neatly reasoned. The same tone he used writing up work reports.

"Child is currently three. Based on past rulings, custody of children under three generally goes to the mother. Recommend delaying until after age four. By then the child will be accustomed to grandparental care, making it easier to argue the father is the 'actual caregiver.'"

"Wife has no maternal family to fall back on and has cut off her old work circle since the marriage. After divorce she will most likely return to her hometown, which can be used as grounds that she 'cannot provide a stable environment for the child's development.'"

"During her postpartum depression, wife had one incident of medication overdose, which can be characterized as an attempted suicide. Already documented in the ER records. This can then be used to argue her mental state makes her unfit to raise a minor on her own."

Postpartum depression. Attempted suicide.