“Did you forget we have a joint bank account? We never separated it after the wedding. And the photo ‘cloud’ is also shared, you gave me the password yourself.”
“These are family debts!” He rushed towards her, panic in his eyes. “You owe half too, by law!”
“Reread the third point of the divorce agreement you just signed without looking.” Viktoria didn’t back down an inch, though he loomed over her. “‘Each party is responsible for debts incurred in their name or for their personal interests.’ A forty-thousand handbag for a mistress is not a family need. Hotel rooms for the two of you are not a family need. Online games are certainly not family needs. These are all your personal debts. And now they are yours alone, entirely and completely.”
He stood in the middle of the room with his arms hanging limp, and the papers he had signed without looking, in his eagerness to get rid of a burden, had turned into a noose around his neck. He had lost his wife, his home, his inheritance, and was left with a million in debt.
Two weeks after the divorce, Lilia called Viktoria. In a trembling, breaking voice, she asked for a meeting, and they met in a cheap coffee shop near the train station, far from the city center where they might be seen by acquaintances. Lilia looked nothing like she did in the photos from Bukovel: gaunt, without makeup, in a cheap jacket from the market, with dark circles under her eyes.
“The pregnancy I used to scare him—it was a lie,” she confessed immediately, twisting a napkin until it tore to shreds. “I made it up so he would leave you and marry me. I thought he had money… He spent so lavishly, gave gifts, booked luxury suites. It turned out he’s a gambler, a debtor. Everything was on credit, all borrowed. Now some people are looking for him, and they’ve already come to my house, threatened me.”
She offered a deal: recordings of Valery’s phone calls with some “fixer” who was helping him plan a lawsuit against Viktoria, and the password to his laptop, which contained documents for a shell company he used to embezzle money from the plant. The price was one hundred thousand hryvnias—for a ticket and to get by for a while in another city. Viktoria transferred the money and received a flash drive the size of a fingernail, on which she found audio recordings, screenshots of transfers to gambling sites for fifty thousand every night, and scans of documents for the shell company “Dnipro Tech Supply.” Embezzlement on a particularly large scale. And also a file with a draft of a forged will, supposedly made by Anastasia Prokhorovna, which he planned to use through an acquaintance notary. The document was dated November 15th—the day his mother-in-law lay in a coma after an overdose of painkillers and couldn’t even open her eyes, let alone sign a document.
Viktoria saved everything onto three different flash drives. One for herself, the second in a bank safe deposit box, and the third she gave to a friend with instructions in case something happened to her…
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