THREE DAYS AFTER GIVING BIRTH TO MY TWIN SONS, MY HUSBAND AND HIS MISTRESS OFFERED ME $200,000 TO SIGN AWAY MY MARRIAGE, MY CHILDREN, AND MY FUTURE.

And what I found there was not an affair.

The Vance real estate company — Eleanor’s pride, the source of the family’s wealth and status — was running a fraud. Inflated property valuations, laundered money moving through shell purchases, investors being shown books that bore no relationship to reality.

Julian was in it. Eleanor was in it. Several of the twenty relatives who crowded into my hospital room to watch me “break” were in it, or living off it.

And I, the forensic accountant they’d convinced to stop working, had spent six months quietly documenting all of it.

That’s why the clause existed.