Chapter Five
MOORE
The first call from my partner, Dane Whitfield, comes on Friday morning, which is thirty-six hours after Aviance left and twelve hours after I told Vanna to resign.
"Someone posted a thread," Dane says, and his voice has that careful, flattened quality it gets when he's delivering information he'd rather not be delivering. "On Twitter. Then it got picked up on Reddit. Then someone tagged one of those accountability accounts—"
"What thread."
"Screenshots. Your wife's — or your—" He pauses. "There are screenshots from that girl's TikTok and Instagram and Twitter, and someone assembled them in chronological order with dates and commentary. It's organized. Whoever put it together knows what they're doing."
I open my laptop and I find it in four minutes.
The account that posted is called @witnessthereceipts. The thread is titled: A documented six-month pattern of a man abandoning his wife for his secretary, and the secretary bragging about it. Thread. ??
It has thirty-seven thousand impressions.
I read the thread with a feeling in my stomach like swallowing broken glass.
The screenshots I recognize. All of them.
Dated, numbered, annotated with plain-language commentary: This is the wife's birthday dinner.
He left. This is Valentine's Day. He left.
This is couples therapy. He left. The thread doesn't editorialize wildly.
It doesn't call me names. It presents the documented pattern and lets people draw their own conclusions, and people's own conclusions are, as it turns out, plenty venomous without editorial assistance.
The quote-tweets.
I scroll through them for approximately two minutes before I have to stop.
The fact that he kept going back and she kept posting about it is WILD. She was absolutely doing this on purpose.
He was in couples therapy while she was keeping a folder. She was already handling the divorce she knew was coming.
Two years. She chose him and he chose the secretary. I hope she gets everything.
The wife is so quiet in all of this. No public statement. Just the receipts. I respect it.
I close the laptop.
I call my attorney — personal attorney, Cormac Trinkerton, who handles family law alongside the financial work he does for the firm — and I tell him about the thread and Carla Hutchins' letter, which arrived in my email at eight a.m.
"How accurate is the thread?" Cormac asks.
"Completely," I say.
Long pause.
"Okay. Here's what we're going to do. We're not going to respond publicly. We're not going to issue a statement, we're not going to engage with the social media aspect at all. Silence is not an admission; it's a strategy."
"I know."
"I'm going to reach out to Carla Hutchins' office today and begin the discovery process. In terms of the dissipation claim—" He exhales slowly. "Tell me about the laptop."
I tell him about the laptop. And the Memphis conference. And the dinners. I tell him all of it honestly because Cormac has been my attorney for four years and I have learned that lying to your lawyer is the fastest way to lose.
"Right," Cormac says, when I'm done. "Some of that is going to be tricky to defend. The laptop is the most vulnerable — it went on a joint account, and based on the documentation her attorney has, the purchase date falls within what they'll frame as the active period of marital breakdown."
"Can I just pay it back?" I say. "Whatever she's owed. Can I just offer it directly, get ahead of the litigation?"
"You can try. Her attorney may or may not advise her to accept an offer.
But Moore—" Cormac pauses. "I have to say this: the best thing you can do right now, for the legal process and for whatever is left of your dignity in this situation, is to be straightforwardly accountable.
Don't hide the ball. Don't argue about things that aren't worth arguing about.
The thread has about eighty thousand impressions now—"
"You're watching the thread while we talk?"
"I have a paralegal whose job it is to monitor. Don't engage. Don't like anything. Don't post. Do not let anyone in your life post on your behalf. The only thing worse than a documented pattern of bad behavior is a documented pattern of bad behavior followed by a defensive public meltdown."
I press my palm against my desk.
"I know," I say. "I know."
"Good. I'll call Hutchins this afternoon." He pauses again. "For what it's worth, Moore. I've seen worse situations than this. You're not past saving."
"I'm not worried about saving," I say. "I just want to make sure Aviance gets what she's owed."
Another pause. Smaller.
"That," Cormac says, "is the right instinct. Hold onto it."