He told her not to delete voicemails, even the cruel ones.
He told her to download whatever bank records she could still access and store copies somewhere Trevor could not reach.
And before they separated at baggage claim, he handed her a business card.
“Call a family-law attorney before you respond to demands about Lily or property,” he said.
“And if you’re willing, have that attorney contact me about the financial records.
I can’t simply hand you an investigative file.
But I can tell the appropriate people where to look.”
Brooke stared at the card.
“Why are you helping me?”
Reid glanced back toward the terminal, where two travelers were still watching him from a distance.
“Because evidence doesn’t care which person tells the better story.”
Then he walked away.
For the next forty-eight hours, Brooke barely slept.
She stayed with relatives outside Charlotte and began gathering everything Trevor had trained her to ignore.
Bank statements.
Old tax returns.
Mortgage records.
Screenshots of messages.
Dates when he had insisted money was tight.
Dates when unexplained transfers appeared.
The amounts were not enormous at first.
Five hundred dollars.
Eight hundred.
Twelve hundred.
Then the pattern changed.
Money left shortly before statements closed and returned from unfamiliar sources days later.
Some transactions carried vague descriptions Brooke had never noticed because Trevor had convinced her finances were complicated and she hated numbers.
Once she stopped looking at each transaction separately, the picture became impossible to ignore.
Trevor had not started hiding money during their breakup.
He had been creating shadows inside their finances for years.
Through an attorney, Brooke authorized the release of her own records and asked that Reid’s investigative team be contacted where appropriate.
Reid did not become her personal investigator.
He stayed inside professional boundaries, which somehow made Brooke trust him more.
What followed was slower and uglier than television justice.
There was no single page that solved everything.
There were layers.
Trevor’s attorney initially claimed the drained account contained funds Trevor had earned and temporarily moved for legitimate obligations.
Brooke’s records contradicted that explanation.
Trevor then claimed Brooke had always known about the transfers.
Her messages asking why they had no savings contradicted that.
He claimed Brooke had abandoned the marital home voluntarily.
His text telling her not to return, combined with proof that the locks had been changed, complicated that story.
He claimed Brooke was financially reckless.
Years of ordinary purchases showed no pattern remotely resembling the instability he described.
And the more pressure Trevor felt, the more he wrote.
That became his biggest mistake.
Instead of speaking cautiously through counsel, he kept sending Brooke messages designed to frighten her.
You have no idea what you’re doing.
Nobody is going to believe you over me.
You never understood our finances.
That last line mattered.
Trevor intended it as an insult.
In context, it supported something else: that he had controlled the information.
Weeks later, Brooke sat in a conference room with her attorney while Reid joined remotely to explain the transaction pattern that overlapped with the broader review.
He did not accuse Trevor of crimes he could not prove.
He simply described records.
