I had not known about the seventy-five thousand dollars. Reading about it made my anger shift again, not away from Ashley's choices but toward the scale of Ryan's deception. He had persuaded one woman that she was losing her marriage for legitimate business reasons and another that she was beginning a new life backed by a successful investment. He had told both of us stories designed to secure our cooperation, though he needed our trust for different things.
Ashley's statement also contained a detail I had not understood at the airport. A week before the Cancun trip, Ryan had asked her to carry an envelope containing the business authorization documents because he did not want the originals left in his luggage. She had noticed my name and asked whether I had approved the property arrangement. Ryan replied that the paperwork belonged to a divorce settlement and that I was being compensated privately for my share. When she questioned why a former spouse would be involved in the resort financing, he said the terms were complicated and accused her of mistrusting him just when he was offering her a future.
The sentence was painfully familiar. He had used the same logic with me whenever I asked about his finances. I wondered how many people had learned to apologize to Ryan for noticing a contradiction. Then I remembered that some of those people had been employees who depended on him, and my sympathy widened into something less personal and more troubling.
Near the end of the statement, Ashley wrote about the afternoon she had met Ryan at the airport. She said he was unusually agitated, checking his phone repeatedly and refusing to explain why he had changed their return flight to a more flexible ticket. She remembered him insisting they needed to arrive in Mexico before the close of business in Dallas. She had assumed it was connected to the resort investment, and she had not asked for more details because she wanted the vacation to begin.
That detail gave new meaning to the note on the hotel confirmation. By the time we return, everything will be settled. I had first read it as a cruel promise to end our marriage. Now it seemed likely Ryan was referring to more than divorce papers, a financing transaction and a plan that required him to be away while other people handled the consequences. The ambiguity was part of what made the message so disturbing.
I did not know whether he had intended to abandon me permanently. I did not know whether he believed he could repair our marriage after obtaining the loan or whether he imagined replacing it with Ashley's. Those questions might never have a reliable answer. What I knew was that he had acted without my consent, and the facts of those actions mattered more than his preferred explanation of what he hoped to accomplish.