Chapter 1 - The Dining Room Execution
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“Sign them!” my husband sneered, his voice dripping with absolute contempt.
One arm was wrapped tightly around my younger sister’s waist, while her hand rested possessively over the subtle curve of her stomach. Vanessa looked at me with a triumphant, feline smile, leaning her head against Daniel’s shoulder as if she had just won the ultimate prize.
I swallowed the humilation burning in my throat, picked up the silver fountain pen, and looked down at the stack of papers resting on the mahogany dining table. I signed every page without shedding a single tear.
“That’s more like it,” Daniel laughed, his chest expanding with arrogant satisfaction.
Three months earlier, I had still stupidly believed Daniel Mercer was my devoted husband. Now he stood across the dining table in the historic estate my grandfather had built, looking at me as if I were nothing more than an inconvenient employee he had finally decided to terminate.
Beside him, Vanessa smoothed down her designer dress, her eyes glinting with malicious joy. She was pregnant—by my husband.
“You’re taking this surprisingly well, Claire,” Vanessa taunted, her voice sweet and poisoned. “I thought you’d be weeping on the floor by now.”
Daniel snorted, pulling her closer to his hip. “Claire knows when she’s lost. She always was a pragmatist.”
His mother, Margaret, sat at the head of the table like a disgraced queen, diamonds flashing at her wrinkled throat. She had hated me since the day I married her son, mostly because my personal fortune had remained frustratingly out of her reach.
The legal stack sat between us like a executioner's block: Divorce Settlement, Property Transfers, Corporate Resignations, Mutual Asset Waivers.
Daniel tapped his manicured finger against the top document. “You sign those, Claire, and you get to keep the downtown condo and a two-hundred-thousand-dollar cash payout. You fight me in court, and my lawyers will make sure you walk away with absolutely nothing.”
I looked up, meeting my sister's icy gaze.
“When did it start?” I asked quietly.
Vanessa tilted her head, enjoying every second of my public execution. “Does it really matter?”
“It matters to me.”
Daniel rolled his eyes, adjusting his gold cufflinks. “Eight months ago, if you must know.”
May you like
Eight months. Vanessa was four months pregnant. Which meant their affair had been going strong while I was sitting alone in sterile doctor offices, undergoing excruciating hormone injections for fertility treatments that Daniel claimed he wanted more than life itself.
Something deep inside me froze into solid, unbreakable ice.
