“Well, Agent Calhoun, the answer to your question is yes. I took his calls and I had lunch with him. Damian is who he is and I know who he is. I didn’t want him showing up at my house. I didn’t want him sending presents and flowers. I didn’t want him anywhere near me. He thought, throughout the whole time we were getting divorced, that I’d come back. He told me so and he worked at it. Only when I saw it through did he leave me alone. Whatever this is, whatever he wants from me, I had to see it through until it sank in with him that I wasn’t coming back and he left me alone. So, I was seeing it through.”

He studied me again and then he remarked, “That took a lot of courage.”

“He raped me, Agent Calhoun. He hit me, but he didn’t kill me. As long as I’m breathing, I’ve got fight in me and luckily I’m breathing.”

It was at that he whispered, “You aren’t like a lot of women.”

“Yes, I am,” I whispered back. “I’m like all women. You see this, but inside there’s something else that I won’t let you or him see, but it’s the mess he left me. But that’s mine. No one gets to it. Everything you get and he gets is a show. One thing you learn really quickly and really well when that kind of thing happens to you is to be a fucking great actress. You don’t have a choice in that because a man like that does something like that to you, you lose having choices. The only choice you have is what role you intend to play. I picked my role and that… that, Agent Calhoun, is what you see.”

I watched him draw in a breath but he didn’t respond.

So I asked, “Now, will you tell me what’s going on?”

He held my eyes as he finally answered.

“Tonight, we swept up your ex-husband’s entire operation. He’s the top narcotics distributor in Denver, with ties direct to Colombia.”

I blinked.

Then I breathed, “What?”

“As far as we can trace it, after a number of years being a low-level dealer to high-end clientele, mostly colleagues, he entered the game in a serious way ten years ago and crawled his way to the top.”

I felt my lips part as I stared at him.

He kept talking. “Your name is joint with his on all his offshore accounts. There are four of them totaling seventy-five million US dollars.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.