Chapter 4
THE UGLY TRUTH
I found Theo Castillo at two in the morning on a women’s legal aid forum, scrolling through threads with titles like How do I protect myself before he knows I know and Is it too early to call a lawyer.
His name came up three times. Every post said the same thing: he listens, he doesn’t flinch, and he fights like he’s the one who got cheated on.
His office is on the fourth floor of a building I drove past twice because the entrance is wedged between a nail salon and a shipping store. No gold lettering. No marble lobby. Just a metal directory by the elevator and a door with his name on a brass plate that needs polishing.
He stands when I walk in and my brain goes into overdrive.
The forum posts didn’t mention this. Dark hair cut close, cheekbones that catch the fluorescent light and make it look intentional, a mouth that sits just slightly uneven, like he’s about to say something he probably shouldn’t.
He’s got his sleeves rolled to his elbows—forearms tanned, a watch that isn’t expensive but fits him like it is—and there’s a pen behind his ear that he seems to have forgotten about.
When he shakes my hand, his grip is firm and brief and his fingers are warm and I feel it all the way up my arm.
“Sit down,” he says. “Take your time.”
I don’t take my time. I open my mouth and it comes out in one long unbroken pour—the dinner, the phone calls behind closed doors, Sloane on my couch drinking my wine, the canceled coast trip, the watch photo, the empty velvet box, the winking emoji.
I watch his face while I talk and it doesn’t move.
Not sympathy, not shock, not the careful professional blankness Lena uses.
Just attention. He’s tracking every detail like he’s building something with them, and every time I say something that should make a normal person react—my best friend, the watch I gave him, the winking emoji—his jaw tightens a fraction and his pen stops moving and he just looks at me.
Not through me. At me. Like what I’m saying matters enough to feel.
When was the last time a man looked at me like what I was saying mattered?
The thought blows through me sideways and I shove it down. Not now.
When I finish, the office is quiet. A phone rings somewhere down the hall and stops.
“Okay.” He pulls the pen from behind his ear and clicks it twice. “You might be wrong.”
My stomach drops. “Excuse me?”
“The watch could be a coincidence. A similar model, a gift from someone else. The travel patterns could be exactly what he says they are—a job that takes him out of town.” He’s not gentle about it.
He’s not trying to talk me off a ledge. He’s laying bricks.
“If I’m going to help you, I need you to understand that what you have right now is suspicion.
Strong suspicion. But a judge doesn’t care about your gut. A judge cares about documentation.”
“I know what I saw.”
“I believe you.” He says it flat, no emphasis, like it’s just a fact he’s entering into the record.
“But belief doesn’t hold up in a courtroom.
Evidence does. And if you’re right—if your husband is having an affair with your best friend and using marital funds to finance it—then you need that evidence locked down before he has any idea you suspect anything.
The second he knows you know, money moves.
Accounts close. Hard drives get wiped. I’ve watched it happen. ”
He leans back and the chair springs creak.
“I lost a case two years ago. Woman came to me after she’d already confronted her husband.
By the time we filed, he’d transferred everything offshore.
She got nothing. Three kids, twenty years of marriage, and she walked out with a settlement that wouldn’t cover a year of rent.
” His jaw tightens—not the professional tightening.
Something personal moving behind it. “That’s not happening to you. ”
The heat hits me so hard my face goes warm.
Not his anger. Not the case. Him—leaning back with his sleeves rolled and his jaw set and this quiet, furious certainty that a woman he met fifteen minutes ago deserves better than what she got.
Caleb hasn’t looked at me with that much conviction about anything in months.
And Theo’s not even trying. He’s just sitting there being serious about my life, and my body has decided that’s the most attractive thing it’s encountered in recent memory.
My pulse is doing something ridiculous. I cross my legs and press my palms flat on my thighs and pray to God my face isn’t doing what my stomach is doing.
Stop it. You’re here to hire a lawyer, not lose your mind.
“What do I need?” My voice comes out steadier than I deserve.
“Everything.” He pulls a legal pad from under a stack of files and starts writing, and I absolutely do not watch his hands.
“Financial records—bank statements, credit card bills, anything you can access. Travel receipts, especially the ones his company reimburses. I’ll run a background check on secondary addresses, utility accounts, any property filings under his name or under names associated with him.
You said the friend lives in a smaller town outside the metro? ”
“Sloane. Yeah, about ninety minutes south.”
“I’ll pull county records there.” He tears the sheet off the pad and slides it across the desk and his fingers brush the edge closest to mine and I hate that I notice. “This is a burner email. Anything you find, anything that feels off, you send it here. Not your personal email. Not a text. Here.”
I look at the address—a random string of letters and numbers at a provider I’ve never heard of. “You do this a lot.”
“More than I’d like.” He clicks the pen again and sets it down.
“Here’s what I need you to do. Go home. Act normal.
Don’t search his phone, don’t check his car, don’t ask questions you don’t already know the answers to.
Be the wife he thinks you are for as long as you can stand it.
Every day you hold your nerve is a day he’s not covering his tracks. ”
“Act normal.” My mouth tastes like pennies. “He’s sleeping with my best friend and you want me to cook his dinner and smile.”
“I want you to win.” He holds my gaze and his eyes are dark brown, almost black, and absolutely certain. “Confrontation feels good for ten minutes. What I’m building you will feel good for the rest of your life.”
I fold the paper with the burner email and slide it into my jacket pocket. My hands are shaking but my voice is clear. “How long?”
“Depends on what I find and how fast you can get me financials. Weeks, not months. Can you hold it together that long?”
I think about the closet floor. The torn shirt. The sound that came out of me in the dark. I think about standing up after it and hanging the shirt back on the rod and smoothing the wrinkle and walking to the mirror and seeing someone I didn’t recognize looking back.
I stand and pick up my purse. “A few more weeks is nothing.”
He shakes my hand at the door. Same grip—firm, brief, professional. But this time I’m ready for the warmth of his palm and I still feel it move through me like a current, and I let go a beat too late and we both know it.
“Mrs. Bennett.”
“Mara.”
“Mara.” He nods once. “Don’t do anything yet. Let me work.”
I drive home with the burner email in my pocket and both hands on the wheel and my jaw clenched so tight my temples throb.
The highway is bright and noisy and ordinary and I’m in the middle of it carrying a secret that could detonate my entire life, and no one in any of these cars has any idea, and somehow that’s the part that steadies me.
I am invisible. I am careful. I am paying attention.
And I’m still thinking about his hands, which is a problem I’m going to deal with never.
Caleb leaves on a Thursday morning—Charlotte again, the Sinclair account, back by Saturday. I smile and say drive safe because that’s what the wife he thinks I am would say, and I wait four minutes watching his taillights disappear past the neighbor’s hedge before I grab my keys.
I stay three cars back on the highway. Far enough that his mirror won’t catch my face. Close enough to keep the Audi’s silver roof in my sightline. My palms are slick on the leather and my heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat.
He doesn’t take the airport exit. The big green sign for departures comes and goes and the Audi stays in the left lane, cruising south.
An hour. Ninety minutes. The suburbs thin out and the exits get smaller and I know where he’s going before the sign appears because Sloane and I drove this highway last spring for her birthday—brunch at the farmhouse restaurant with the lavender lemonade.
Exit 42. She joked about it. The answer to life, the universe, and finding decent parking.
He takes exit 42. Passes the turn toward Sloane’s apartment complex.
Turns into a residential neighborhood I’ve never seen—newer houses, tidy yards, matching mailboxes—and pulls into a driveway.
I roll past at twenty miles an hour. White siding.
A garden along the front path with rosebushes pruned tight and a stone border.
A red front door, glossy, freshly painted.
The kind of red you pick on purpose. His Audi sits in the driveway like it lives there, and he’s already inside before I reach the end of the block.
I park four houses down and kill the engine. My legs are shaking. The steering wheel is wet where my hands were.
Then I see the sign. Three doors down from the red door—a blue-and-white placard on the curb: OPEN HOUSE TODAY 10–2. The door is propped open. A woman in a blazer is setting a sandwich board on the front walk.
I check my face in the visor mirror. Mascara intact. Eyes dry. I look like a woman shopping for a house in a nice neighborhood on a Thursday morning, and that’s exactly who I’m about to be.