The drive back to the apartment was a blur of sweeping wipers and blurred taillights. Arthur didn't turn on the radio. He drove the speed limit, signaled at every turn, and parked perfectly between the faded yellow lines of his assigned spot.
He was operating on autopilot, his brain compartmentalizing the shock the same way it handled a catastrophic server failure. Panic didn't fix corrupted drives. Cold, hard logic did.
He unlocked the front door. The apartment smelled like Clara's expensive lavender reed diffuser. Her running shoes were kicked carelessly by the entryway mat. Her mail was scattered on the console table. It was the home they had built, but standing in the foyer, Arthur felt like a trespasser.
He didn't pour himself a drink or smash a framed photo. Instead, he walked into the spare bedroom they used as a home office, sat at his custom-built PC, and woke up the dual monitors.
He cracked his knuckles.
First things first: visibility. Clara was a shark in the boardroom, but when it came to technology, she was completely reliant on him. He had set up her iPhone, her iPad, her MacBook, and her iCloud. He knew her PINs. They used the same password manager—one he held the master key to.
With a few keystrokes, he bypassed the two-factor authentication on her iCloud account, routing the prompt to his own device and silencing it before it could ping her phone.
He watched the little loading circle spin. Then, her digital life spilled out onto his right monitor. Texts, emails, calendar invites, location history.
He opened her iMessage and typed in a name: David Vance. The new Regional Director. The guy from the office.
The text thread populated instantly. It went back three months.
Arthur's jaw tightened as he scrolled. It started as work banter, then shifted to late-night drinks, and finally, hotel room numbers and crude jokes about how clueless her husband was.
David (Tuesday, 11:14 PM): Still can't believe he bought the 'emergency audit' excuse. Clara (Tuesday, 11:18 PM): He buys whatever I sell. He's sweet, but thick as a brick. See you in 10.
Arthur didn't cry. The numbness was total now. He highlighted the entire thread, ran a script to export the data, and saved it to an encrypted flash drive hidden in a false bottom of his desk drawer. Data was leverage. Data was power.
At 1:45 AM, the front door unlocked.
Arthur minimized the windows, pulled up a generic Reddit thread on his main screen, and leaned back in his chair.
Clara walked into the office a moment later. Her hair was slightly damp from the rain, and her silk blouse was wrinkled at the hem. She smelled like wet pavement, her signature Chanel perfume, and beneath that—something sharp and masculine. Sandalwood. David's cologne.
She was holding the brown paper takeout bag.
"Hey," she said, her voice overly bright. The voice she used when pitching a client. "You're still up."
"Just finishing some maintenance on a client's server," Arthur said. He didn't turn around, keeping his eyes on the monitor. "How was the grind?"
"Exhausting." She leaned against the doorframe, holding up the bag. "Did you leave this?"
Here it was. The test.
Arthur finally spun his chair around. He gave her the same warm, tired, dependable smile he'd given her every day for five years.
"Yeah," he said smoothly. "I dropped it by around ten-thirty. I knocked, but the blinds were drawn and you didn't answer. Figured you had your noise-canceling headphones on and were in the zone. I didn't want to break your focus."
Clara's eyes darted left, just for a fraction of a second. A micro-expression of pure panic. She swallowed hard.
"Oh," she said, her knuckles whitening slightly around the paper handles. "Right. Yeah, I had my headphones in. I was... drafting the Q3 projections."
"Hope it didn't get too cold," Arthur said.
"No, it was perfect. Thank you, babe. You're the best."
"Anything for you," Arthur replied.
She offered a tight, unconvincing smile and hurried down the hall toward the bathroom. A second later, Arthur heard the shower turn on. She was scrubbing David Vance off her skin.
Arthur turned back to his monitors. She was rattled. He had planted the seed of doubt. She would spend the next week wondering exactly when he knocked, what he heard, and if the "safe, comfortable loser" was playing her.
He opened a new browser window and typed in the URL for their joint savings account. There was $85,000 in there. The house downpayment they'd been saving for.
Arthur rested his finger on the mouse. He wasn't going to take it all. That was theft, and it was messy.
But there were a thousand invisible, perfectly legal ways to bleed an empire dry from the inside out. And Arthur had all night to write the code.