Page 67 of Love Unscripted
Aaron remained still beside her.
“So I started asking questions. For the first time ever.”
Her mouth tightened faintly.
“I requested statements myself instead of just accepting the summaries my father gave me. I started comparing dates. Transfers. Withdrawals.”
“And it didn’t add up?”
“No.” She shook her head slowly. “Not even close.”
Her voice became more subdued.
“There were accounts I didn’t recognize. Investments I’d supposedly approved but had never heard of. Large amounts moving in and out constantly. Some payments were marked as temporary reallocations. Others had almost no documentation at all.”
She exhaled slowly.
“At first I kept trying to explain it away. I thought maybe there was some sophisticated strategy I simply didn’t understand.”
“But deep down?” Aaron asked softly.
“Deep down, I already knew something was wrong.”
She looked at him then, eyes glistening.
“And the more I pulled on the thread, the more everything unraveled. So I commissioned an audit.”
Her jaw tightened.
“That was when I discovered I owed taxes on money that technically I’d earned—but no longer actually had.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
“It all became public after that,” she said more quietly. “There were investigations. Lawsuits. News stories. And a lot of people assumed I must’ve known what he was doing.”
Aaron shook his head immediately. “That’s insane.”
“But I understood why they thought it,” she said softly. “I was the celebrity daughter with money and privilege. From the outside it looked impossible that I could’ve missed it.”
She gave a brittle laugh.
“The truth was, I was just naïve.”
Aaron’s hand tightened around hers.
“And around that time, Simon became my hero, my rock,” she continued after a pause. “My entire world felt unstable. Financially. Emotionally. Publicly.” She stared ahead. “And Simon…”
Her voice softened slightly.
“Simon felt safe. He was eleven years older, established, confident. He listened to me when almost everybody else was judging me. He told me the situation with my father wasn’t my fault. He encouraged me to learn about my finances and take control of my life again.”
She shook her head faintly.
“I leaned on him emotionally long before the affair became physical. By then we were already deeply attached. He’d confide in me about his marriage, tell me how unhappy he was, how lonely he felt and I wanted to believe him. In the back of my mind, I knew it was wrong,” she admitted. “But I kept justifying it. I told myself his marriage was already over emotionally. That his wife didn’t love him. That I wasn’t destroying something healthy.”
She looked down, ashamed.
“I lied to myself because the truth would’ve forced me to walk away.”
