During the Divorce, My Husband Looked at His Watch and Hurried to His Flight, but After My Calm Answer, His Mother’s Smile Froze on Her Face

In the courthouse corridor, my husband was waiting for me to sign the divorce from him, while my father was fighting for his life in the hospital.

“Can you be a little faster?” Emiliano said to me and looked at his wristwatch. “If I am late, I will miss the plane.”

There was neither regret nor the tension that the ending of a six-year marriage should have brought in his voice. Only irritation. As if I were merely an obstacle for him.

I squeezed the pen lying on the table so hard that my ring sank into my skin. Three months earlier, I had called exactly this man from the hospital corridor and begged him to take money from our joint savings.

My father urgently needed heart surgery.

Even then, Emiliano had looked at his watch.

“This money is already planned, Lucia.”

“Planned for what? Father may die.”

“We cannot solve all your family’s problems with our money.”

Music had been heard behind him. Now I understood that he had not been alone that evening.

The court employee pushed the last sheet toward me.

“Sign here.”

Emiliano sighed.

“Lucia, please. I have a flight.”

I raised my head and looked at him for the first time as one looks at a stranger.

“Do not worry. I will not delay you today anymore.”

I signed.

He took his copy, looked at his phone, and smiled. Not for me. For a message.

Outside, his mother, Beatriz, and his sister, Fernanda, were waiting with three new suitcases. Fernanda was holding an expensive bag, the kind about buying which I had told her more than once that she should think first.

“At long last, you got rid of this burden,” Beatriz told me and hugged Emiliano.

Fernanda raised the bag in front of me.

“Look, Lucia. I bought it anyway. You always used to say that money should be spent carefully.”

Her laughter sounded in my ear like the sound of a metal spoon.

And I knew exactly in which statement this bag was written.

Three months earlier, my father had fallen in the workshop. That same day, the doctor told me that his artery was almost completely blocked and that the operation had to be performed that very night.

I called Emiliano seven times. He answered on the eighth.

“Let us use our emergency account,” I told him.

A long silence fell.

“This money is in an investment.”

“Which investment?”

“It does not matter.”

That night I borrowed money from friends, sold part of an old investment with a penalty, and took my father in for surgery.

He survived.

I returned home at four in the morning to take documents. In the cabinet lay the small device for my company’s electronic signature. Usually, I closed its box tightly. That night I found the lid half a finger-width open.

My hands froze.

I was the owner of a medical equipment distribution company. With that signature, I approved only major operations.

I turned on the computer.

Nine credit lines appeared. All in my company’s name. I had opened none of them.

Emiliano was listed first among the authorized users. After him were Beatriz, Fernanda, and two more relatives.

Hotels, airline tickets, expensive watches, and restaurants alternated on the screen. One reservation in Madrid had been made for three people. The amount had been deducted from the same line protected by my signature.

The signature looked like mine.

But it was not mine.

I sat down on the chair and for the first time felt that there was no longer enough air in the house. After several minutes, I downloaded all the files, saved copies on another device, and called a lawyer.

“Lucia, are you sure that they did this?” he asked me.

“I am sure of only one thing,” I answered. “No one could have done this by accident.”

In the following weeks I pretended that I knew nothing. Emiliano considered my silence a defeat.

“At long last you understood that panic over your father was not worth it,” he told me one evening.

I turned the teaspoon around the edge of the cup and tried not to let anything show on my face.

“Maybe you are right,” I told him.

That night he slept, while I gathered contracts, access records, and transfers.

I filed the divorce papers.

I also filed a complaint.

But Emiliano thought that I was simply a heartbroken wife.

Now he was hurrying toward the airport, while I already knew that the ticket for his trip was not only an airplane.

At the courthouse door Beatriz asked me:

“Are you not going to say goodbye?”

“I said goodbye three months ago.”

They did not understand.

I got into the car and went to my father. He was sitting by the hospital window, turning an orange in his hand.

“Is it over?” he asked.

“One part,” I told him.

The phone rang. It was my lawyer.

“Lucia, they are already heading to the airport. The investigative team is on the way. The bank lines will be frozen before the flight, but first you need to know one thing…”

Such silence fell in his voice that my breath caught.

“What happened?” I asked.

Instead of answering, the lawyer told me to open the brown folder lying on the table and look at the last page. My father saw my face and took my hand.

I slowly extended my hand toward the folder…

On the last page of the folder were written the access time and address. The record had been made not in the courthouse building, but in my house.

“When was this filmed?” I asked.

“On the night when you were looking for money for your father’s operation,” the lawyer answered. “Your company had a camera at the warehouse entrance. Backup recordings were stored there too.”

My heart rose into my throat.

“Who is visible?”

“I will not tell you completely yet. The police are already working at the airport.”

My father put the orange on the table.

“Lucia, if Emiliano did all this, you must not meet him alone anymore.”

“I am no longer alone,” I told him, although my voice was trembling.

In the evening the lawyer sent me a new statement of transfers. The money had not been spent only on travel. The money taken in my name was being transferred to someone’s secret account, and from there it was returning to Emiliano’s family.

One transfer had the purpose: “Consulting services.”

But the recipient company carried my surname.

“Who owns this company?” I asked.

The lawyer was silent for several seconds.

“Your signature is on the documents. However, another person is the owner in the registry.”

“Who?”

At that very moment, a message arrived on my phone. The airport camera recording was ready. I opened the video.

Emiliano was arguing with a security employee, while Beatriz was struggling with a suitcase. Then a woman appeared in the frame whom I had never met before. When Emiliano saw her, his face changed.

The woman said only one phrase to him:

“If you do not confess now, everything will affect your mother too…”

The video cut off there…

I rewound the last frame of the video several times. The unknown woman stood in front of Emiliano, holding a red folder. Her voice was low, but the words could be heard clearly.

“If you do not confess now, everything will affect your mother too.”

The lawyer stopped the frame.

“This woman is Mariana Rojas,” he told me. “The company registered in your name actually belongs to her. She was Emiliano’s former accountant.”

“Why is she helping me?”

“Because money was stolen from her too. But that is not the main thing yet.”

He opened a file and sent me the signed examination. The specialist confirmed that my electronic certificate had been used from the device in the house, although all the operations had been entered from Emiliano’s laptop.

My breathing became heavier.

“So he knew the password?”

“You gave it to him yourself when you were setting up the company accounts. But after that you changed the password. Therefore he used a digital copy of your signature and took out the old backup key.”

That evening Emiliano was found in a closed room at the airport. His flight had been canceled, his bank cards were blocked, while Beatriz and Fernanda were explaining to the police that they knew nothing about the expenses.

I was not there. The lawyer told me everything by phone.

“Emiliano says that you gave consent,” he told me.

I laughed, but this laughter was not from joy.

“Then he must have a document proving my consent.”

“He does. A letter sent in your name.”

On the screen I saw the text: “I agree to the use of funds to help the family.”

My signature stood at the bottom.

“I did not send this letter.”

“We know. The letter was sent from his account. But now we have a second problem.”

“What problem?”

The lawyer lowered his voice.

“Mariana confessed that Emiliano was not only covering expenses. He was transferring money to one person who was seeking the authority of a director in your company.”

“To whom?”

He did not have time to answer. A call came to the phone from an unknown number. I answered.

“Lucia Navarro?” a man’s voice asked. “Your husband was only the beginning. If you do not take out the documents tomorrow morning, the incident that happened in your warehouse will become known to everyone.”

“Which incident?”

Silence fell on the other side of the call for several seconds.

Then the man told me:

“The one about which your father knows nothing.”

The call ended.

My father was sitting in front of me and could not understand why my face had turned white.

That same night I received an alarm notification from the warehouse. The door had not been broken. Someone had the correct key.

The lawyer called the police, but before they arrived, I found one thing on the desk in my workroom: a small metal key on which the number of my company’s warehouse was written.

Emiliano was not in prison. He was still being questioned.

But someone already wanted all the evidence to disappear.

And I still did not know whom I should fear more—the man who called me, or the person who left a key in my house…