"At least try to get her to drink the juice," Leo said, his voice dropping into a rough whisper.
The words laid his desperation completely bare. At this point, getting Olivia to drink a glass of apple juice felt like climbing a mountain. It felt like a victory.
Brooklyn took the tray carefully. "I'll try."
She turned and walked upstairs.
Once she was gone, Leo was left alone in the quiet kitchen. He could not stand the stillness. He walked over to the dining table, where his laptop sat open next to a legal pad.
He had spent the last week working relentlessly with lawyers and a private investigator he trusted. But over the last forty-eight hours, the updates had not been what he expected. He was one step away from wanting to drive to James’s office and break the man’s jaw, because the problem with the documents was vastly worse than they had initially believed.
At first, they thought the signatures were simply forged.
But the investigator’s initial analysis had complicated everything. According to a preliminary review by a handwriting expert, the signatures on the financial documents did not look mechanically copied, traced, or drawn by someone else. The pressure, the slant, the loop—they appeared physically authentic. They looked exactly like Olivia’s handwriting.
That made the legal situation exponentially harder.
The lawyers had explained the nightmare in dry, clinical terms. The experts could testify that the signature appeared to have been written by Olivia, but they could not prove whether she understood what she was signing. James had likely obtained real signatures from Olivia by slipping pages into routine household paperwork, leaving forms incomplete, or attaching her signature pages to entirely different financial documents after the fact.
If a document bore Olivia’s actual, physical signature, the legal battle shifted. It was no longer a straightforwardcase of "forgery." It became a brutal, drawn-out fight over fraud, misrepresentation, coercion, and the misuse of marital authority.
If the banks and business partners relied on documents that appeared completely valid, reversing the substantial transfers would be incredibly difficult. Because some of the drained funds were tied to marital property, debt, and shared assets, Olivia could lose access to her own money.
Worse, if James had leveraged any credit lines or business guarantees tied to her name, the bakery itself could be at risk if the paperwork stood up in court.
Leo needed more than Olivia just saying she did not knowingly authorize the transfers. He needed proof of how James obtained the signatures, what documents had been altered, and exactly where the hidden money had gone. Right now, all they had was Olivia’s word against a stack of legally binding paper.
Leo hated the system. He hated that it might require a devastated woman to prove she was systematically deceived, while a predator got to hide behind a veil of legitimate-looking paperwork.
He stared at the laptop screen, his blood boiling. If they could not prove what James did, Olivia might never recover the stolen money. She could lose her bakery. The bakery wasn't just a business to her. It was her life. Her passion. Her dream. It was the one beautiful thing she had built with her own two hands—the part of her James had absolutely no right to touch.
Leo started pacing the length of the dining room.
His thoughts darkened, turning violent and sharp. He thought about the affair. The stolen money. He thought about the way James had convinced everyone Olivia was unstable, turning her own friends against her. He thought about Olivia,curled in a ball in his guest room for a week, while James sat in his corner office, plotting his next lie.
Leo felt as though every decent boundary he had respected for years had been thrown directly back in his face.
He had respected her marriage. He had stayed in his lane. He had forced himself to watch her love James. He had accepted the agonizing distance because he genuinely believed James made her happy.
And James had repaid that by gutting her life, humiliating her, and then attempting to paint Leo as the danger.
The thought nearly snapped the last thread of his control. Leo gripped the back of a dining chair, his knuckles turning white. He rubbed a hand over his face, fighting the overwhelming urge to walk out the door, find James, and tear him apart.
But he didn't.
Because Olivia needed him here. That was the only thing anchoring him to the floor.
More than forty minutes passed.
Brooklyn still had not come back downstairs.
At first, Leo told himself that was a good thing. Maybe Olivia was talking. Maybe Brooklyn was helping. Maybe this was the very first sign of progress they had seen all week.
But then the worry crept in. What if Olivia got upset? What if Brooklyn pushed too hard without realizing it? What if Olivia asked Brooklyn a question Leo had not explained yet? What if Brooklyn's presence made Olivia feel even more displaced?
Leo could not take the silence anymore.
He walked quietly up the stairs. When he got within a few feet of the guest room, he stopped.
