“And I handled the physical evidence,” Libby added. “I started paying attention to his behavior, documenting his lies, even recording some of his phone conversations when he thought no one was listening.”
“You recorded him?” I asked, shocked.
“Mom, we had to protect ourselves,” Libby said firmly. “Dad was stealing from us. We needed proof.”
Natty pulled up another screen.
“Look at this. I tracked every penny he moved. Small amounts at first, just like he planned. $500 here, $1,000 there. Always on days when you were working late or busy with other things.”
I studied the spreadsheet my 17-year-old daughter had created. It was more detailed than anything I’d ever seen in my accounting work.
“But here’s the thing Dad didn’t count on,” Natty said with a smile that was both proud and slightly scary. “I didn’t just track what he was taking. I figured out how to track where it was going.”
“And once we found their joint account,” Libby added, “we realized we had the power to stop him.”
I looked at my daughters with a mixture of amazement and concern.
“What exactly did you do?”
Both girls smiled and I saw a determination in their eyes that reminded me of myself when I was their age, fighting to get into college despite having no money.
“We decided,” Natty said slowly, “that if Dad wanted to play games with our future, we’d show him how the game is really played.”
“We spent weeks planning everything,” Natty said, pulling up a folder on her laptop labeled Project Justice. “We knew we had to be smarter than Dad, and we had to make sure he couldn’t hurt you or us ever again.”
I stared at the folder, amazed that my teenage daughters had been running a secret operation right under my nose.
“The first thing we did was gather evidence,” Libby explained. “Real evidence that would hold up if we ever needed to go to court.”
Natty clicked on a subfolder called digital evidence. The screen filled with screenshots, saved emails, and bank records.
“I learned how to capture everything without leaving any traces. Dad never knew I was documenting his activities.”
“How did you get access to his accounts?” I asked. “Dad’s not as smart as he thinks.”
Natty said with a smirk.
“He uses the same password for everything. Your birthday plus the year you got married. Once I figured that out, I could access anything.”
My heart sank a little. Even his passwords were about me. Yet he was still planning to abandon our family.
“But we needed more than just digital evidence,” Libby said. “We needed to understand Jessica and what she really wanted.”
“So I created a fake social media profile,” Natty continued. “I became Ashley Chen, a 25-year-old marketing assistant who just moved to town. I started following Jessica on Instagram and slowly became her online friend.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“You catfished your father’s mistress?”
“It was surprisingly easy,” Natty admitted. “Jessica loves attention and validation. Within 2 weeks, she was telling Ashley everything about her life, including her relationship with a married man who was going to leave his wife for her.”
Libby pulled out a notebook filled with handwritten notes.
“While Natty was working on Jessica, I was studying Dad’s patterns. When he left the house, where he went, how long he stayed. I even followed him a few times.”
“You followed him?” I gasped. “That was dangerous.”
“I was careful,” Libby assured me. “I just needed to confirm what we suspected. And I was right. Every Tuesday and Thursday, he went to Jessica’s apartment instead of working late like he told you.”
Natty turned her laptop screen toward me again.
“But here’s where it gets interesting. Through my conversations with Jessica, I learned something Dad doesn’t know.”
“What?”
