Wealth, Cheating, and Prison

He pulled a card out of his wallet and tossed it onto the table as if giving alms.

The door slammed shut with a bang, and Cameron drove away.

I stood in the empty living room, staring at the shopping card with a spending limit of only 100 dollars.

I did not understand how things had come to this.

I had once been a renowned genius architectural designer in the industry, yet at some point I had ended up living like a parasitic vine that could only survive by clinging to him.

I was even subjected to his strict control when it came to spending the money I had earned through my own hard work.

I turned and walked into the study.

Cameron had been an extremely cautious person, and he had a safe at home where he kept the company's core secrets for the past few years.

He thought I didn’t know the password.

Because to him, I had been a foolish woman who only knew how to draw plans and understood nothing about numbers or corporate operations.

But he had forgotten that I was an architect.

My sensitivity to numbers had quickly allowed me to discover that the password was *#0826.

I had always thought the password would be our wedding anniversary, until I saw that Twitter post yesterday.

I saw the line. [Thank you, Cameron, for your indulgent love. The 1-million-dollar "Wendy Art Exhibition" was the best birthday gift I ever received!]

The symbols *# were Cameron's habit, and 0826 was Wendy's birthday.

I turned the dial, and the safe opened.

Inside lay a thick document, with the cover reading. Asset Transfer and Trust Establishment Plan.

The document was very thick and entirely in Spanish, but it posed no difficulty for me.

I flipped open the first page, and the blood in my body froze instantly.

This had been a meticulously designed trap.

Cameron had been transferring the core assets of the Lister Group—including those parcels of land and my design patents—into the name of an offshore company registered in the Cayman Islands.

And the beneficiary of that offshore company had been listed as Wendy.

What shocked me even more was another document titled. Risk Assumption Agreement for the Summit Project.

In the column for the project's legal representative, the signature was my name.

The land for the Summit Project had serious ownership disputes and might even have involved illegal land use.

Once the scandal broke, I, as the legal representative, would have faced at least ten years in prison.

And he would have taken the assets and his new lover and fled far away.

I clutched the documents in my hands, my knuckles turning white.

So that was it.

No wonder he had kept urging me to produce the drawings, and no wonder he had insisted that I be the person in charge of this project.

It wasn’t that he trusted me—he had planned to squeeze out my last bit of value and then send me to prison.

Buzz—

My phone vibrated with a WhatsApp message from Cameron.

[Are the drawings finished? Wendy said she wants to look at your designs and learn from a senior's thinking. I'll bring her home for dinner tonight—prepare a few dishes.]

He still wanted to see my designs?

He wanted to bring the assistant home for dinner?

And expected me to cook for the woman who had taken a million dollars?

He must have been dreaming.

I took a deep breath, backed up all the documents, uploaded them to an encrypted cloud drive, and then restored the safe to its original state.

In the afternoon, I went to the hospital.

My father had not woken up yet, with many tubes inserted into his body, a sight that made my heart ache.

I sat by the bed, holding his withered hand. "Dad, I'm sorry. I’ve been stupid and failed to see Cameron’s true colors. Don't worry. Your medical expenses, and everything I earned through my own hard work, I’ll make sure he pays me back double."

I went online and sold some of the luxury handbags I had bought, earning more than 10 thousand dollars in total.