Chapter 85: Rachel’s Dilemma [FIXED!]
The morning had arrived with paperwork.
Rachel sat at her kitchen table with a mug of tea she hadn’t touched and a document she had read four times without the reading making it any easier to hold. The letter from her ex-husband’s legal team was two pages, precise, and devastating in the particular way of things written by people who charged by the hour to be devastating.
Daniel was contesting ownership of the building.
Not just contesting — he had documentation. Bank records showing a transfer made eighteen months into their marriage, a sum significant enough to constitute a material investment in the property. His legal team had assembled it cleanly and submitted it as evidence that his financial contribution to the complex entitled him to a share of ownership that superseded the settlement terms Rachel had assumed were final.
She put the letter down and looked at the window.
The cruelty of it was in the timing. The transfer Daniel was citing had come from his account — that much was true and she couldn’t dispute it. What the documentation didn’t show, what his legal team had either missed or was actively concealing, was that the money had passed through his account from hers.
She had moved it across for tax reasons on the advice of an accountant who had since retired and whose records she had not thought to preserve because at the time she had been married and had trusted the man she was married to.
That trust was now being used against her.
She had one asset. One thing that was hers outright, that she had invested in and maintained and built her independence around since the marriage ended. This building — these walls — were the difference between a woman who had survived a difficult marriage and a woman who had nothing to show for the years she had spent inside it.
And there was a very real chance a judge was going to hand it to Daniel.
She picked up her mug, found it cold, and put it back down.
She thought about calling her sister. Her sister would listen and say the right things and offer to come over but none of it would change the document on the table.
She thought about Liam for a second.
The thought arrived and she sat with the discomfort of it honestly. Liam was a lawyer. A good one or at least she assumed — she knew enough about his background to know he might be decent. He would understand this situation faster than anyone she could call and would know exactly what questions to ask.
He was also the man she had been sleeping with for less than a week, so burdening him with her problems might throw him off.
Calling him with this crossed a line she had been careful to maintain — the line between what they were and something that required him to show up differently, to see the parts of her life that were currently failing rather than the parts she had chosen to present, it would show far too much vulnerability.
It made her a client. It made her vulnerable in a way that the other kind of vulnerable didn’t.
She looked at the letter again and wondered if there was truly no other way.
Then she picked up her phone upon realizing this was her best chance at gaining some sort of advantage.
It rang three times and Rachel was already panicking as she thought he wouldn’t pick up the phone. Rachel considered hanging up and who could blame her at this point?
["Rachel."] His voice was easy, and casual yet she still felt very nervous to lay her complaint.
"Hey." She paused. "Do you have a minute?"
["I have several. What’s going on?"]
She told him. Not all of it at once — it came out in the order it was sitting in her chest, which wasn’t entirely linear, but Liam listened without interrupting and she could hear him processing as she spoke. She told him about Daniel’s claim, the transfer, the missing paper trail, the letter from his legal team and the timeline they’d been given to respond.
When she finished there was a brief silence and she wondered if she had a mistake.
["Okay,"] Liam said.
"Okay?"
"I can work with this but I will need to take a look at those documents."
She exhaled slowly. "Liam, I don’t want you to feel like you have to—"
["Rachel."] His voice was calm and direct. ["Send me everything you have. The letter, whatever financial records you still have access to, the original settlement documents if you kept them."]
"I kept them."
["Good. That’s a start, a very good start as a matter of fact."]
She was quiet for a moment. "I feel strange asking you this."
["Don’t, I’m the man blowing your back out after all."]
"We aren’t exactly—"
["Rachel."] A pause. ["Send me the documents."]
She almost smiled. "Are you going to charge me your standard hourly rate?"
A beat.
["Honestly I should,"] Liam said.
["Standard rate, billable from the moment you called."] Another beat.
["But I’m already getting my money’s worth from this arrangement."]
Rachel opened her mouth.
Liam laughed — genuine, low — before she could form the response. ["Send me the documents. I’ll look at everything tonight."]
She sat back in her chair and looked at the letter on the table, which somehow seemed slightly less immovable than it had twenty minutes ago.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
["Don’t thank me yet,"] he said. ["Let me read it first."]
-
The documents landed in his inbox forty minutes after the call ended.
Liam was already at the kitchen counter with the laptop open, coffee beside him, the focused energy of a man who had found something real to do with his hands other than gaming, of course.
He opened the files in sequence — the letter from Daniel’s legal team first, then the settlement documents, then the bank records Rachel had managed to pull together.
He read everything twice before forming an opinion.
Then he sat back and looked at the ceiling.
"This isn’t as closed as she thinks."
Daniel’s legal team had done competent work — the documentation was organised and the argument was coherent on the surface.
A significant transfer from Daniel’s account into a joint holding, timed to coincide with a material renovation period for the building. On paper it read as investment. On paper it gave him standing.
But paper had layers.
Liam leaned forward and opened the bank records again, this time with a notepad beside him. He started mapping the timeline — the dates of the transfers, the amounts, the accounts involved. The money had moved from Daniel’s account, yes. But money didn’t originate in a vacuum and the question that Daniel’s legal team had either not asked or had asked and buried was where it had come from before it reached his account.
Rachel had mentioned the tax arrangement. An accountant, now retired.
Retired didn’t mean gone.
Records didn’t disappear because the person who generated them stopped working. They existed somewhere — filed, archived, stored in a system that a competent discovery request could surface.
He made a note but Liam was suspicious of her lawyer.
The second thread was the settlement document itself. He read it three times, slowly, the way he read everything that mattered. The language around property ownership was present but not airtight — there was ambiguity in one clause around "material contribution" that Daniel’s team was leaning on, but ambiguity cut both ways. The same clause could be argued in Rachel’s favour if the origin of the funds could be traced back to her.
"This will take some time," he thought. And luckily for Rachel, time was something he currently had.
He thought briefly about Rachel — about the version of her that had gone quiet after the phone call, the one carrying something she hadn’t wanted to put down in front of him. The fact that she’d called at all told him more than she’d probably intended. She wasn’t someone who asked for help easily.
He appreciated that she had.
He also appreciated, in a separate and entirely different way, that resolving this would return things between them to the sexual tangle he had grown to enjoy.
Rachel under stress was Rachel unavailable, and Liam had noticed — with some surprise at the noticing — that he had grown accustomed to her particular brand of warmth in ways the system’s low-value rating hadn’t predicted.
He cracked his knuckles and pulled the laptop closer.
There was work to do.