Relle squeezed my hand under the desk, and I realized my smile back at the counter—when I signed—hadn’t been weakness. It had been instinct. Something in me had recognized the shape of a bluff, the rushed cruelty of someone trying to keep you from asking questions.
“Do I qualify?” I asked, voice tight.
Jerome nodded. “You already did. He forced the timeline. He wanted you out before you could speak to anyone like me.” Then he leaned back and said the part that made my stomach flip: “The moment you signed, he stopped controlling the outcome.”
The next week was quiet on the outside and thunderous underneath. Jerome filed what needed to be filed. Banks were notified. A trustee was contacted. Scott’s calls went from smug to sharp to pleading, like he was walking down the stages of grief—except what he was grieving was money, not marriage.
Kayla showed up once, outside my apartment, one hand on her stomach, the other holding her phone like it was a shield. “He said you were going to take everything,” she blurted, eyes wide with the kind of fear that isn’t moral—it’s financial.
I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to. “He told you I was the villain,” I said, “because he couldn’t admit he set you up too. A man who can erase eight years can erase anyone.” Her expression cracked, just slightly, as if the future she pictured had shifted an inch off its tracks.
When Scott finally sat across from me in Jerome’s office, he looked smaller than I remembered. Not because he was sorry—because he was cornered. His knee bounced. His jaw stayed clenched. He tried to smile anyway, the way liars do when they want you to forget they’re lying.
