“Rachel, please. Don’t do this.”

His voice was barely a whisper.

The confident, condescending man who had spent years telling me I didn’t understand business was gone.

“Don’t do what, Daniel?” I asked.

“Don’t ruin me,” he said.

“You did that yourself when you signed my name to those transfer sheets,” I replied.

“I can explain that,” he said, his voice rising in panic. “The market in the Springs was moving fast. I needed to secure the deposit, and you were in Washington. You weren’t answering your personal phone.”

“I was in a classified briefing,” I said.

“I didn’t think it would matter,” he muttered. “We’re married. What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is—”

“What is mine belongs to me,” I corrected him. “And the funds you took were not even mine to give. They were held in a trust for my late mother’s estate, managed under a military probate system.”

A heavy silence fell over the line again.

I could hear the rain starting to beat against the windowpane of my office.

Outside, the lights of the base flickered through the pine trees.