Chapter 2 - The Woman Who Studied Me
By the end of that day, Malia Shaw had vanished.
Her apartment was empty.
Her phone was disconnected.
Her agency claimed she had not worked with them in over a year.
The modeling career she had described in such detail had been mostly fiction. She had done occasional promotional work, but there had been no major contracts, no international campaigns, and no demanding schedule that explained her disappearances.
There had only been Victor Lane.
And me.
Alden Group’s investigators worked quickly.
By Thursday, they discovered that Shaw Meridian Consulting had been created eight months earlier through a chain of shell companies. The account had received money from the client-entertainment budget, but it had also received deposits from companies connected to Victor Lane’s firm.
The pattern was obvious once someone bothered to look.
Malia would meet me.
She would flatter me.
She would ask about a client.
I would talk.
Then, within days, Victor’s company would adjust a proposal, undercut a bid, or approach a client before we had made our move public.
Every time I believed I was impressing her, I was feeding her information.
One memory became impossible to ignore.
Malia and I were in a hotel suite after an industry dinner. I had complained about a potential acquisition Alden Group was preparing to advise on. I mentioned that the client was nervous about a rival bidder.
Malia had looked at me with wide eyes.
“You must be under so much pressure,” she said.
Then she asked which bidder worried us most.
I told her.
Three days later, Victor Lane’s company made an aggressive move on the same target.
At the time, Thomas Alden had blamed an internal leak.
Now I knew where it came from.
The board suspended me indefinitely.
I was not fired yet because investigators needed access to my testimony. They wanted names, dates, conversations, passwords, hotel details, and the precise sequence of every transfer I approved.
I gave them everything.
Not because I was noble.
Because the lies had become too large to carry.
The federal investigators questioned me in a windowless room downtown.
They asked whether I had knowingly shared confidential material.
“No,” I said.
“Did you share it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you approve false expense reports?”
“Yes.”
“Did you personally benefit?”
I thought about the hotels, dinners, gifts, and the bracelet.
“Yes.”
Each answer stripped away another layer of the man I had believed I was.
At first, I wanted to blame Malia.
Then I wanted to blame Victor.
Then I wanted to blame the pressure of my job, the fear of failure, the loneliness in my marriage.
But every explanation ended at the same place.
I had made choices.
Malia did not force me to cheat.
She did not force me to unlock my laptop.
She did not force me to sign expense reports without reading them.
She saw my arrogance and used it.
But I gave her the weapon.
Three days after Emily filed for divorce, Thomas Alden asked me to meet him at his home.
I expected another interrogation.
Instead, he sat across from me in his study and poured coffee into two plain white mugs.
“This is the first time I have seen you look like a human being in months,” he said.
I did not know what to say.
Thomas had been my mentor since I was twenty-six. He had promoted me, defended me, and brought me into rooms I had once believed I did not deserve to enter.
Now I had embarrassed him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Thomas nodded.
“You should be.”
I looked down.
“But you need to understand something,” he continued. “The worst thing you did was not sleep with Malia. It was not even approve the transfers. The worst thing you did was believe you were too important to be accountable.”
His words settled heavily in my chest.
“You built your entire identity around being admired,” he said. “You wanted to be the successful husband, the executive, the man whose wife waited at home because she trusted him. And when someone offered you admiration without responsibility, you took it.”
“I lost Emily.”
“Yes.”
“I might lose my career.”
“Yes.”
“I could lose my child too.”
Thomas leaned back.
“Then perhaps you should finally learn what it means to earn trust instead of expecting it.”
That night, I returned to the apartment.
It was almost empty.
Emily had taken her clothes, books, framed photographs, and the small plants she kept near the windows.
The unopened crib box still stood in the nursery.
I sat on the floor beside it.
Inside the kitchen cabinet, I found Emily’s prenatal vitamins.
I remembered seeing them on the counter the morning she left.
I held the bottle in my hand and felt something break.
My wife had been carrying our child alone while I was spending money on a woman who was laughing at me behind my back.
I had treated Emily’s quietness like weakness.
But she had been brave enough to gather the truth while I hid from it.
The next morning, I called Martin Hawthorne.
“I want to update the custody agreement,” I said.
He was quiet for a moment.
“What do you mean?”
“I want Emily to have primary custody. I want financial support established immediately. I want a trust set up for the baby. And I want the agreement to state that I will not contest any reasonable safety restrictions.”
Martin paused.
“Mr. Pierce, Mrs. Pierce has not asked for that.”
“I know.”
“Why are you offering it?”
Because I had taken enough.
Because I had spent too long believing fatherhood was something I could claim without earning.
May you like
Because I wanted my child to know, someday, that I had finally tried to do one thing right.
“Because it is what they deserve,” I said.
