Chapter 12 - The Fallout Begins
|
The ballroom did not immediately erupt into screaming chaos. People like Lucinda and Cole had built their entire lives around rooms full of wealthy individuals who knew exactly how to remain perfectly polite while watching someone else publicly fall apart.
Guests simply stared intently into their champagne glasses. Investors frantically checked their phones for market updates. Corporate lawyers leaned toward each other and spoke in urgent, careful whispers. The bank president sitting near the front looked furious, not shocked. He had likely been waiting for a valid excuse to stop pretending Cole’s inflated numbers actually made sense.
Cole ended the call and turned slowly toward Natalie, a look of betrayal on his face.
"You knew about this?" he asked, his voice cracking.
Natalie did not answer right away. She looked down at the wet, stained carpet. Then at the half-opened, discarded gifts. Then at Lucinda, who had treated every single object in that room as something she could claim by right.
Finally, she looked directly at him.
"I knew you were lying," she said softly, but with immense clarity. "I just did not know how much."
Cole’s expression violently changed from sheer panic to aggressive anger. "Your mother put this insane idea in your head!"
"No," Natalie said firmly. "You did."
Lucinda stood up again, desperately trying to salvage her dignity. "You are both being heavily manipulated by Evelyn! She just wants to punish us because she has never, ever accepted that Natalie married into a significantly better family."
I almost smiled at the absurdity. The sentence was so incredibly familiar. For years, Lucinda had spoken about the Wexford name as though it were a royal inheritance that made every member of the family inherently, morally superior to everyone else. But their vast wealth did not make them better people. It only gave them far more expensive ways to hide what they truly were.
"You stole money from your own pregnant daughter-in-law," I stated coldly. "You maliciously planned to control her finances after childbirth. You stole her baby gifts. You repeatedly lied to lenders. And you used a baby shower to impress people who were currently deciding whether to keep financing your sinking company."
Lucinda’s eyes flashed with venom. "You have absolutely no proof of any of this."
Mara calmly lifted a second, thicker folder from her briefcase. "We have the bank transfers, the emails, the hotel surveillance footage, the signed event-staff statements, the digital copies of the proposed guardianship documents, and a crystal-clear recording of Mr. Wexford instructing Natalie to sign blank pages during her last medical appointment."
May you like
Natalie’s face crumpled in horror. She looked at Cole, feeling sick. "You secretly recorded me?"
Cole did not answer. That silence was infinitely worse than any verbal confession.
