Chapter 9 - The Trial
The trial began on a cold, gray Monday in March.
The courtroom was packed. The case had become something of a local sensation—Denver’s very own real-life soap opera, complete with betrayal, sex, money, and a vengeful wife who’d outsmarted her husband at his own game. Reporters lined the back wall. Cameras waited on the steps outside.
I wore a simple black dress to the first day. No jewelry. No makeup beyond mascara and lip balm. I wanted to look like what I was: a woman who’d been wronged. A woman who’d fought back and won.
Julian looked terrible.
He’d lost at least twenty pounds since the arrest. His once-perfect hair was thinning, graying at the temples. He wore an ill-fitting suit the county had provided him—he’d sold his own clothes to pay his legal bills. He sat at the defense table, his head down, refusing to look at me.
Vivian, on the other hand, had dressed for the part of the innocent victim. She wore a frumpy gray sweater, a long skirt, no makeup, her hair pulled back in a severe bun. She’d traded her four-inch heels for sensible flats. She looked like a Sunday school teacher.
I almost laughed.
The prosecution laid out their case over the next two weeks. They called witness after witness: the forensic document examiners, the accountants, the police detectives who’d investigated the Seattle boating death (it had been re-opened, I learned, after our case broke). They played the airport recording. They read the emails aloud. They showed the Liquidation Timeline spreadsheet to the jury, pointing to each line, each date, each cold calculation.
Vivian testified first.
She cried on the stand. She dabbed at her eyes with a crumpled tissue. She told the jury how Julian had “groomed” her, how he’d “used his position of power” to force her into the affair and the scheme, how she’d been “afraid for her life” if she didn’t cooperate.
Marcus cross-examined her.
He was gentle at first. Lulling her into a false sense of security. Then—slowly, methodically—he destroyed her.
He brought up the Seattle case. The Portland case. The $2.5 million inheritance. The emails to her sister. The fact that she’d opened the Hale Holdings bank account three weeks before Julian had even mentioned “restructuring” the company.
“Ms. Drake,” Marcus said, holding up a photograph of her in a $15,000 designer dress at a charity gala two months before the arrest, “you claim you were an unwilling participant in this scheme. And yet—according to credit card records—you spent over $120,000 of the Hale Holdings money on clothes, jewelry, and luxury travel in the three months before the TRO was issued. Does that sound like the behavior of a woman who was ‘afraid for her life’?”
Vivian sputtered. “I—I didn’t have a choice. He made me—”
“He made you buy a $20,000 diamond tennis bracelet?” Marcus asked, raising an eyebrow. “He made you book a $30,000 first-class around-the-world cruise for two, scheduled to depart the day after the divorce was supposed to be finalized? He made you do that?”
The jury was staring at Vivian now. Not with sympathy. With disgust.
She broke down completely after that. Screaming that Julian was a monster, that she’d been used, that none of it was her fault. The judge had to call a recess.
Julian testified the next day.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t beg. He just looked defeated. Tired. He admitted to everything. The affair. The fraud. The forged documents. The plan to take the house. He didn’t try to blame Vivian anymore. He didn’t try to blame me.
“I was greedy,” he said, his voice flat, staring at his hands. “I was stupid. I married a woman who gave me everything, and I threw it all away for money and… and attention. I thought if I had more money, I’d be worth something. I thought Vivian made me powerful. But she didn’t. She just made me a criminal. And I hurt the only person who ever really loved me. There’s no excuse for what I did. I deserve whatever happens to me.”
He looked up then. Right at me.
“I’m sorry, Clara,” he said. “Truly.”
I didn’t look away. But I didn’t feel anything either. No anger. No sadness. No satisfaction. Just… nothing. He was a stranger to me now. A character in a story I’d finished reading.
The jury deliberated for eight hours.
They came back at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon.
Guilty on all counts.
For both of them.
Julian was sentenced to twelve years in state prison. Vivian—because of her prior record and the suspicion surrounding the Seattle death—got eighteen.
As the bailiffs led them out of the courtroom in handcuffs, Vivian turned and screamed something at me. I couldn’t hear what it was. I didn’t care. Julian didn’t look back.
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It was over.
Really, truly over.
