Chapter 3
L. Reyes was not a name I knew. I sat very still in my study chair, the cursor still blinking beside the transfer confirmation button, and typed back to the unknown number: Who is this?
The reply came within ninety seconds.
I'm his other one. The first one. We've been married for six years. He told me he travels for a consulting firm and is gone three weeks out of every month. I found your number in his contacts under "Denver Account." I think we should talk.
I did not transfer the money that afternoon.
I sat in that study for nearly four hours, on the phone with a woman named Carla Reyes, who lived in San Diego with two children, ages four and seven, who believed their father — a man she knew as Lucas Reyes, not Lucas Bennett — flew constantly for his job in international logistics consulting. Carla had married him eight years ago. She had no knowledge of me, of Denver, of the seven years I had spent believing I was his only wife.
May you like
What unfolded over the following six weeks was not the version of revenge I had been seconds from executing in my study that afternoon, and it ended up being considerably more thorough than draining a bank account ever could have been.
Carla and I retained the same attorney — a bigamy and financial fraud specialist out of Los Angeles named Diane Okafor, who explained to both of us, separately and then together, that Lucas's situation was not merely an affair but a felony: bigamy is illegal in both California and Colorado, and the financial structure he'd built — moving money between accounts under two different surnames, two different Social Security presentations he'd somehow maintained for years through forged documentation — constituted wire fraud at a scale that interested federal prosecutors considerably more than either of us initially expected.
