Chapter 10 - Kara
Kara Sloan chose a diner halfway between Columbus and Dayton and wore a baseball cap low over her blond hair like Jonathan’s mistakes might still be able to recognize her in public. She was prettier than I expected and more tired than anyone should be at thirty-one.
“I’m not here because I’m noble,” she said after the waitress left. “I’m here because I’m done being scared of a family that isn’t even rich enough to buy the damage they cause.”
That almost made me smile.
Kara told me she dated Jonathan for eleven months, ending shortly before the charity-build event where he later claimed to have met me by chance. He had already been talking about “a Davis girl” weeks before that.
“He called you practical,” she said. “Then strategic. Then lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“He said a woman like you could clean up a family image and open doors his mother had spent years slamming shut.”
I sat very still.
Kara dug into her bag and handed me copies of old texts she had saved after Jonathan once accused her of stealing from him. One message from Jonathan to Kara, sent two months before our supposed first meeting, read:
Need to be at the Davis Foundation build. Her schedule says she’ll be there.
My schedule.
“Where would he get that?” I asked.
Kara shrugged. “I figured work friend. Banker. I didn’t care then.”
Luke, I thought. Or maybe someone else.
Reward: Jonathan targeted me before he ever approached me. The romance had been staged from the opening move.
Then came the twist that stung deeper than planning.
Kara slid her phone across the table and hit play on an old voice note Jonathan had once sent during one of their breakups. He sounded drunk and mean.
“My mother says women like you and Charlotte are different categories,” he said in the recording. “You’re for fun. She’s for leverage.”
The word leverage made my stomach turn, but it wasn’t even the worst part.
He went on.
“Once the wedding’s done and a few signatures happen, nobody cares if the marriage lasts.”
I copied the file to my drive while my hands stayed strangely steady.
“What changed your mind?” I asked Kara. “Why come forward now?”
Her eyes flicked away. “Because Florence called me three nights ago. She wanted to know whether I still had anything ‘sentimental’ from Jonathan. She sounded scared. People like Florence only sound scared when something real has already broken.”
When I got back to Reese’s office, Marta was waiting with deposition prep. Jonathan’s lawyers had noticed my deposition for the following week. Before we started, Reese handed me another development: hotel security had preserved camera footage showing me arriving alone, injured, with my suitcase and laptop bag on the wedding night.
Not enough to prove the slap by itself.
Enough to destroy the story that I partied too hard and invented the rest.
At the end of the day, Marta asked me the question that mattered most.
“Charlotte, if Jonathan offers settlement, what do you want?”
I thought of the bucket, the hand on my arm, the invented theft, the planned signatures, the neat little file where my life had been turned into exploitable traits.
“I want the truth,” I said.
My phone lit up at that exact moment.
Unknown sender.
May you like
I have the hallway footage. If you want it, come alone.
📖 Kara confirmed I had been targeted from the start, but the message waiting on my phone offered the one recording that could prove the slap—and demanded I trust the wrong kind of stranger. 👇
