The new day allowed Melissa to gather her thoughts, and over a caffeine-laden breakfast, her normal decaf blend was in the recycling… she began to plan her revenge in detail. Uppermost on her mind was protecting her children.

At the very least, she could make sure that their future was safe. That future needed money if they were not to be saddled with huge amounts of student debt. Now that she knew more about her dear husband's finances, she was determined that he was going to pay for that future as part of their divorce.

Two things became clear after the third cup of coffee, and they were one: she was even more certain that she was going to divorce him on her terms, not his. The photo of his intern showed a definite bump in her stomach. She was very pregnant. Letting him go might just allow him to do the right thing, but deep down, she didn't think he would, but she would give him a chance. The second was that she would have to be careful not to tip him off. The last thing she wanted was for him to start covering his tracks before she served him the divorce papers and a detailed financial settlement.

Melissa clearly remembered watching some of his speeches on C-SPAN, in the House or to committees where he would berate the speaker or the witness for being corrupt to the core and that sooner or later, he’d catch them taking bribes before they could cover their tracks. All the time, he had been the one on the take. An operation that had netted millions of dollars, and she was just as guilty as he was for profiting from his corruption. Her only saving grace was that she had known nothing about it until now, so proving intent would be hard. Thank goodness for small mercies.

After a lot of thought about changing the venue for her meeting with Dana, she decided to risk it. She would have to accept that there was a risk that the meeting would be posted on social media and someone in his staff would see it. Some aspiring social media posters had recorded her every move in the hope of getting a scoop and their post going viral and, therefore, boosting their ratings. She'd seen it happen to the wife of another congressman. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, everyone with a phone was a potential source of a social media post that could easily be taken out of context and a career ruined.

By the time the coffee pot was empty, she had the outline of a plan for the weekend ahead. She had to make a list of demands for Dana. Plus, she had to hope that she could prepare the divorce papers before she went to DC, where she would confront him and his girlfriend. At the very least, she would get her great-grandmother's ring back. He owed her that, at the very least.

Just before lunchtime, Melissa rearranged her appointment at the Salon for the following day. Normal service and appearances were slowly being restored after the psychological tsunami of the email arriving in her inbox.

---

Melissa kept returning to the email and the photos. She began to wonder if he had taken other pieces of jewellery of hers and given them to her or one of the other interns with whom he'd had an affair. The more expensive pieces were in the safe that was hidden under the floor in his office.

Now determined to find out, Melissa went to the safe and tried to open it and failed. Her 'dear' husband had changed the combination. That spurred her to dig deeper into his papers in the hope that he’d written down the combination. She didn’t find the numbers, but she did find details of his other bank accounts. These confirmed that the images in the photo were genuine. Whoever had sent them to her certainly had it in for her husband. She owed that person a lot for opening her eyes to the real person she had been married to for more years than she cared to remember.

She had been at it for almost four hours when she found a memory stick buried in the bottom drawer of his desk. It was hidden in a box that had once contained some silver cufflinks that she'd given him to celebrate his first re-election to Congress. Also in the box was the pin that was given to all members of the House. A different one is issued for each two-year session of the house. There was no sign of the cufflinks; they were probably somewhere in DC or the trash... In its place was a 32Gb memory stick. Underneath the case, there was a thick wad of $50 bills. She estimated that there was close to $10,000 there.

Out of interest, she counted it, and sure enough, there was almost $10,000. One $50 bill short. When she got to the end, a wry smile came to her face. Not only was it just short of the limit where banks have to report transactions to Uncle Sam, but it tallied with a withdrawal from the account that was used … or should have been used to pay her a salary for being on his staff. It would be ironic if she used that money to pay for her lawyer and her flights to DC. Satisfied with her work, Melissa took that money back to the kitchen and left it on the counter.

Melissa dithered for around 10 minutes before inserting the USB drive into her laptop. When she browsed the contents of the USB drive, she swore at herself for dithering. At the top of the most recently modified files, there was a spreadsheet that recorded all the under-the-counter dealings he'd done since his first election to Congress. All the gory evidence of his corruption was there. She had discovered the equivalent of the crown jewels. That evidence answered the question of who had been funding their children’s schooling. The money had all come from a State-owned Oil Company in Russia. That left a bitter taste in her mouth. His boss had been mouthing off for years about the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia hoax’. Only it wasn’t a hoax, at least for one representative on that side of the aisle.

For a while, she wondered why he'd kept all that incriminating evidence. Then she realized that it was all part of his insurance policy. The USB stick also had details of the offshore accounts and the dirt on several congressmen, senators and very rich donors to the party. Even Melissa knew that it was dynamite if it fell into the wrong hands. If he went down, then they would go down with him. Other documents and images on the USB stick confirmed that. Dirt, dirt and yet more dirt all dragged up from the smelly DC swamp that our former dear president promised so many times to drain within months of taking office. So far, it was just another politician's broken promise. The sooner she was well away from the stench that had spread hundreds of miles to her part of the world, the better.

Another spreadsheet gave Melissa details of all his investments. It confirmed that the photo from the email was real and, sadly, was just the tip of the iceberg.

The sums astounded Melissa. Slowly, she came to realize that their lifestyle could not have been funded solely by his salary as an elected member of the house. His PAC and SuperPAC accounts had plenty of money in them, but no transactions had been made with them for the last four months. Before that, there were regular withdrawals of $9900. At first, she found that a strange amount. Something triggered a memory from a news report about our dear previous POTUS and how he could spend PAC money as he liked until he announced that he was running for re-election this year. Those withdrawals were just $100 less than the federal reporting limit. That alone seemed to indicate that he was up to no good.

Melissa was about to give up for the night when she made one more discovery. The records showed that she owned the house that she was living in. She'd always assumed that it was in his name, but a scanned copy of a letter from a tax advisor confirmed that for tax purposes, it was now in her name and was dated some ten years before, right around the time when Jeff was first elected to Congress. His signature on the transfer looked real enough, but hers was a forgery. The plot thickened.
That presented Melissa with another problem and a huge potential liability. To the best of her knowledge, she had never paid any property taxes. At first, she thought that was because she had no real income. She did receive a small allowance from her husband for the work that she did on his behalf in the district. Thanks to the nagging from Jeff, she managed that income carefully and only used it for things directly related to the district. Every cent was properly recorded. But… ever since they were married, he'd taken care of her tax returns. She wondered if she might be on the hook for a lot of back taxes, both local and federal. That would need to be cleared up with the divorce.

Melissa did some more checking on the county and state government sites, where she discovered that the property taxes on the house had been paid well in advance of the due date and that she was all clear on the property tax front. She was still very much in the dark as to exactly where the money for the taxes had come from, and only he could answer that, but she had her suspicions. That left the IRS.

Melissa went onto the IRS site and held her breath. Her account showed an income as one of the authorized staff of a House Member. While that was not that uncommon, she breathed out and wondered where that money had gone. None of it had come her way. Another grift? She didn't know. All she did know was that she was up to date with her IRS account. The same applied to her state income tax. Jeff had made sure that all her contributions to Social Security and Medicare were current. It was clear to her that he’d defrauded her of over $100,000 in income since he’d been elected and failed to pay her the salary that she was due as a member of his staff. The allowance was just 20% of the salary that he was apparently paying her. Thankfully, her bank account would not show the income that he was claiming should the IRS start investigating.

He'd been stuffing his pockets at her expense since the day he went to DC. Was he that shallow? Did he ever truly love her? The answers were probably Yes and No.

For a moment, she got angry, but then it dawned on her that the last thing her husband would want was a full IRS or state tax audit. Unlike the previous president, whose taxes had been under audit for years and was almost a badge of honor for him, for her, it was a disaster waiting to happen. So far, they’d been lucky. She’d never seen even a bent penny of the bulk of the salary that her husband was supposed to be paying her. For a moment, she wondered if that was used to fund his sordid affairs. Hotel rooms in DC didn’t come cheap, especially those frequented by the elected representatives in both houses.

Like most people, she was her own worst enemy when it came to taxes. He'd done them for her right from the day they were married. Before that, her recently deceased stepfather had done them since she came of age. There was no one to blame but herself. That would have to be rectified before she could move on with her life. His words came back to haunt Melissa.

“Don’t worry, your pretty little head with your taxes; I will handle them just like your stepfather did.”
She had been a fool for the entirety of their marriage. It hurt. Hard.

There was plenty of other evidence on the memory stick. The cache of saved emails to him at an account that she knew nothing about revealed a history of dirty dealings on bills with lobbyists. She made two copies of the memory stick and returned it to where she'd found it.

Melissa then spent an hour returning all the files to where she had found them after photographing every page with his fancy digital camera. All the time, her anger towards her husband was increasing. What a way to spend an evening. When she was done, Melissa uploaded all the files to her laptop. Then she wiped the memory card clean and filled it with music tracks, the crappier, the better, especially Rap and Hip-hop. He hated those genres. It might have been small, but it was a victory, and she was able to go to bed happy.

---

Melissa spent the rest of the weekend doing the same things that she did almost every weekend when her husband wasn't at home. She'd called it 'Keeping up appearances' for many years. That show included going to church and listening to a fiery sermon about infidelity. She had to fight hard to resist making a scene, and she left the church feeling guilty as sin, even though it was not her who had strayed. She counted herself lucky that she wasn't a Catholic. Otherwise, she'd be in the confessional for several hours confessing what she wanted to do to her husband, especially around making him eat his penis in front of the church.

After the polite post-service conversation with other church members, which was mostly making polite excuses for her absent husband, the whole charade made her feel dirty as hell. Pretending that he was working on a bill was just another lie to add to the dozens, if not hundreds, of lies that she’d told over the years.

The warm early spring weather allowed her to eat dinner that Sunday evening on the outdoor deck. Their house was built on the top of a ridge and had a view to die for. She felt rather sad that this could well be the last time she'd be sitting there enjoying the scene. Melissa was fully resigned to leaving the district but had no idea at all where she was going to end up.

That was for later. She had her adulterous criminal husband to deal with first.

As the sun set behind the hills on the other side of the valley, she raised a glass of chardonnay.
“To the place that my husband is going to, make it as hot as hell. To the place where I will go, make it a long way from here.”

[to be continued]