A second later, the old man clutched his chest, gasping for air.
We called an ambulance immediately. He had suffered a minor heart attack. He survived, but the medical emergency shattered whatever remaining denial he held about his youngest son.
While Arthur Sr. was recovering in the hospital, police located Selina hiding at a relative’s home. Under police interrogation, she completely broke down. She turned over text threads, wire receipts, and recorded phone calls with Diego. She admitted knowing that Diego was Mateo’s real father, acknowledged using Maya’s DNA sample, and confessed her role in the vendor billing fraud.
When I confronted her in the prosecutor’s office, she tried to justify herself: “I was just trying to secure a future for my son!”
I looked at her with cold disgust. “You used my six-year-old daughter’s DNA. You helped rob a business that fed nearly two hundred families, and you allowed a man to abandon his four daughters just so your son could be crowned a corporate heir. That isn’t protecting a child—that’s grand larceny.”
Selina began to weep, but I felt zero sympathy.
Then she added softly, “There’s something else, Mariana.”
Arthur was standing outside the glass office. He stepped inside instantly. “Selina, shut your mouth!”
She let out a bitter, mocking laugh. “Now you want me to stay quiet, Arthur?”
She pulled up an archived text thread on her phone and handed it to the detective.
There were direct text messages from Arthur. In one, he had written: “Make sure Mariana doesn’t see the Q2 audit reports before the divorce decree is finalized.”
In another: “Keep the reported revenue low. If our profit margins look thin, the asset valuation drops for her settlement.”
A dead, heavy silence fell over the room.
I looked at my ex-husband. “You knew?”
Arthur lowered his head, unable to look me in the eye. “I knew Diego was padding a few operational expenses… I thought it was minor.”
“To accomplish what, Arthur?”
He didn’t answer.
“Say it out loud,” I demanded.
Finally, he whispered, “I wanted the corporate valuation artificially lowered so your divorce settlement payout would be smaller.”
And right then, I understood the whole picture. Although Diego had orchestrated the massive embezzlement scheme, Arthur had deliberately opened the door. He was not an innocent victim fooled by his brother; he had actively conspired to cheat me out of my rightful financial settlement. The only difference was that the fraud he tolerated to rob me was far larger than he had anticipated.
“Sixteen years,” I said, my voice steady and deadly calm. “When I met your family, your father owed millions. My parents sold their land to help us. I invested my life savings. I worked through four pregnancies, built your supply chain, and secured your national contracts. And in the end, you tried to manipulate the books to pay me pennies on the dollar.”
Tears welled in Arthur’s eyes. “I made a mistake, Mariana…”
