I testified once.
Julian had prepared me, but I didn’t need much preparing.
I sat in the witness box, and the prosecutor asked me to describe the night of my birthday, and I told the truth, plainly, in front of a packed gallery and a bank of cameras.
Not the wine. Not the dress.
The kneeling.
The word “place.”
And then, calmly, the eleven rigged contracts, the shell companies, the hospital wing.
Isaac’s defense attorney — not as good as Julian, almost no one is — tried to paint me as a vengeful wife.
“Isn’t it true,” he said, “that you assembled all of this only after discovering your husband’s affair? That this is personal?”
“Yes,” I said.
The gallery murmured.
“It’s completely personal,” I said. “I found the affair and the fraud on the same night, on the same computer.
The affair broke my heart.
The fraud broke the law.
I could do nothing about the first one.
But I was raised to never look away from the second.
You’re asking whether I’d have stayed quiet if he’d been faithful. I don’t know. I’ll never know.
What I know is this: there is a hospital wing in this state that was supposed to have a pediatric intensive care unit, and it doesn’t, because this family took the money.
You can call that personal if you want.
I call it the only thing I did right in six years of marriage.”
The courtroom was silent.
The defense attorney sat down.
Arthur Vance was convicted on nine counts.
Isaac on six.
