My Husband Of 32 Years Kicked Me Out Into A Sub-zero Night Wearing Only A Nightgown. He Thought I’d Freeze To Death, But I Just Met The Owner Of His Hospital Group. How Should I Execute My Revenge?
The Paper Trail
The next morning, a company car picked me up from Constance’s mansion and drove me to the New England Regional Healthcare headquarters, a towering glass building in downtown Boston. A security badge was waiting for me at reception with full administrative access. As I walked through the executive floor, conversations died. People stared and whispered. Raymond had clearly been busy spreading his version of events. I could read it in their eyes.
I kept my head high and walked straight to the small office I’d been assigned. It was right next to Marcus’, which meant I had a perfect view of everyone coming and going. The IT director, a nervous young man with thick glasses, came by within the hour.
“Mrs. Price, I have your login credentials. Full system access as Mrs. Whitmore requested.”
He handed me a sealed envelope, practically running away afterward. I opened my laptop and got to work. I started with the Meridian Medical Supplies contract. On the surface, everything looked legitimate. Standard agreements, pricing schedules, delivery terms—but something felt wrong.
The prices were too high. I cross-referenced with industry standards and found markups of 30 to 40% above market rates. I dug deeper. The payments went to Meridian, but when I traced the company registration, I found it was a shell corporation created just two years ago. The address listed was a PO box in Delaware. Money was flowing out of our hospital system and disappearing into a black hole.
I worked through the night following the trail. Invoice after invoice, payment after payment, all approved by the same person: Raymond Price, Director of Operations. By dawn, I had enough evidence to prove systematic embezzlement on a massive scale—millions of dollars siphoned through fake contracts.
But this alone didn’t explain Marcus’ fear. Raymond could be fired and prosecuted for fraud, and Marcus could simply claim he was deceived by a trusted employee. No, there was something else, something personal. I expanded my search. I dug into archived emails, deleted files, old security logs, and then I found it.
Buried in a backup server was a video file from 18 months ago. I plugged in headphones and watched. It showed Marcus in what looked like a private dining room at an expensive restaurant. He was meeting with a man I didn’t recognize. They spoke briefly, and then the stranger handed Marcus a thick envelope. Cash.
Marcus hesitated, then took it and slipped it into his jacket. I ran the stranger’s face through a search. He was the CEO of Bayate Healthcare Solutions, New England Regional’s biggest competitor. The date on the video was 2 weeks before we mysteriously lost a major contract to build a new rehabilitation center—a contract everyone assumed we would win.
Marcus had sold out his own company for a bribe, and Raymond had the proof.
The Betrayal
I copied everything to a secure cloud server I set up myself. Learned that lesson from too many crime shows. Then I made a backup on a flash drive that I kept on my person at all times. But before I could go to Constance, I decided to confront Marcus first. I needed to understand the full picture.
I called him to my office. He came reluctantly, looking like a man walking to his execution. I showed him the video without a word. The color drained from his face. He watched his own hands take the bribe, and when it ended, he buried his face in his hands.
“It was one mistake,”
he whispered.
“I had gambling debts, enormous ones. They threatened my family. I panicked. I thought no one would ever know.”
“How did Raymond get this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he bribed someone at the restaurant. Maybe he was already following me. But 6 months later, he walked into my office, put a flash drive on my desk, and said, ‘We’re going to work differently from now on.’ I’ve been trapped ever since.”
“The Meridian contracts. He created them to steal money and you signed off because he was blackmailing you.”
Marcus nodded miserably.
“Every month, more invoices, more fake vendors. I knew he was robbing us blind, but if I said anything, he’d release that video. My grandmother would disown me. I’d probably go to prison.”
I looked at this broken man and felt a strange mixture of pity and contempt. He was weak, but his weakness had been weaponized against me too.
“Raymond cleared out our bank account,”
I said quietly.
“And he called my sister to tell her I cheated on him. He’s destroyed everything I have.”
Marcus looked up.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to finish what I started.”
The Other Woman
The next few days I worked like a woman possessed. I traced every dollar Raymond had stolen. I found where the money ultimately went. It wasn’t just sitting in offshore accounts. Raymond was investing it.
I discovered a new company called Atlantic Prime Medical Services, registered eight months ago—a private healthcare startup poised to compete directly with New England Regional. The registered owner was a name I didn’t recognize, Thomas Hartwell. But when I dug into the incorporation documents, I found early drafts with different names: Raymond Price and someone named Amber Chen.
Amber Chen. The name meant nothing to me. But when I pulled her personnel file from our HR system, everything became horrifyingly clear. She was a young nurse, pretty, hired two years ago. Her business trips and expense reports matched Raymond’s travel schedule perfectly. The restaurants, the hotels—they were in the same cities on the same dates. The perfume I smelled on his coat—that was her.
But there was more. I found reimbursement claims for medical appointments at a fertility clinic.
My heart pounding, I drove to the clinic that afternoon. I sat in my parked car across the street for 2 hours, and then I saw them. Amber walked out first, one hand on her visibly pregnant belly, the other holding sonogram photos. Raymond pulled up in his BMW, the car he told me was a company lease. He got out, walked to her, and wrapped his arms around her with a tenderness I hadn’t seen from him in years. He placed his hand on her belly and smiled—a genuine, loving smile. Then he kissed her long and deep.
They got in the car together and drove away. I sat there frozen. The betrayal wasn’t just an affair. He was building a new life, a new family, a new business empire, all funded with money he’d stolen while keeping his legitimate wife trapped and powerless. And I was just an obstacle he tried to throw out with the trash.
I drove back to Constance’s mansion and laid everything out for her. The embezzlement, the bribe video, Marcus’ complicity, the competing company, Amber and the baby. Constance listened without interrupting. When I finished, her face was unreadable.
“The annual healthcare leadership gala is in 4 days,”
she finally said.
“Every hospital administrator, board member, and investor in New England will be there. Raymond will attend to celebrate his perceived victory.”
She stood up and walked to the window.
“You will prepare a presentation. Short, devastating. You will present it at the gala in front of everyone who matters in this industry. We will not just end his career. We will incinerate his reputation.”
