Chapter 18 - The Aftermath
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She stubbornly refused to sign for forty excruciating minutes. She angrily called me vindictive, vulgar, common, cold, unnatural, and unforgiving. She loudly insisted that decent, respectable families handled these matters privately.
Marisol calmly reminded her that decent, respectable families generally did not finance their mistresses with stolen corporate funds.
Graham eventually signed first. His hand shook violently as he held the pen.
Adrian signed next, crying silently, the tears dropping onto the legal paper.
Genevieve stubbornly held out until Marisol calmly opened a bright red folder ominously labeled CRIMINAL REFERRAL DRAFT.
Then, she snatched the pen and signed.
The blue ink smeared slightly on the page because her hand trembled with suppressed rage.
As the grueling meeting finally ended, Adrian lingered by the door, looking back at me with the pathetic expression of a desperate man searching for one last, unlocked entrance into my life.
“Isla,” he said, his voice breaking. “I swear to you, I never actually wanted to hurt you.”
I gathered my bag from the table. “That may honestly be the saddest thing you’ve said all day.”
His eyes filled with sudden hope, as if my acknowledgment of sadness meant there was a residual softness he could exploit.
I finished the sentence, shattering that hope instantly. “Because it means hurting me was just an acceptable side effect of getting what you wanted.”
Then, I walked out of the room before he could try to turn his fake remorse into another manipulative performance.
The divorce was finalized three months later. It was not handled cleanly, because absolutely nothing touched by the Arden family seemed capable of staying clean, but it was executed thoroughly.
Bianca officially testified against Adrian in civil court to aggressively reduce her own legal and financial exposure. Ravel Creative Strategy completely collapsed under an intense federal tax review and mounting fraud allegations.
Graham was forced to sell a beloved family vacation property to settle a portion of the massive private debt.
Genevieve tragically lost the grand Arden estate after her nervous lenders officially discovered exactly how much of its lavish maintenance had been fraudulently supported by money routed from my company.
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The wealthy society women who had once eagerly copied her elegant table settings and praised her taste completely stopped inviting her to their luncheons. She was forced to move into a modest, unassuming apartment in the city and, according to Elodie, constantly complained to anyone who would listen that the lobby smelled “too democratic.”
I did not laugh when I heard that. Not because it was not funny, but because by then I had fully learned that revenge has an incredibly short shelf life. True peace lasts much longer.
