He Divorced Me for His Mistress, Then I Became the Richest Woman Alive

"You gave me nothing that I couldn't have gotten without you."

Kaelith stood in the doorway with a grocery bag wrapped over her wrist, watching her husband button his shirt in front of another woman.

Lysandra reached for her earring on the nightstand, Kaelith's nightstand, and put it in without hurrying.

"Don't stop on my account," Kaelith said.

"Adrian." Kaelith's voice came out steadier than she expected. "You're home early."

"You're home early," he said, like she was the one who'd made a mistake.

"I canceled my appointment. I was going to make the salmon you like."

"You should have called first."

"Should I have? Is that the rule now, I should call before I come home to my own house?"

"That's not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean, Adrian?"

"Kaelith—"

"Don't." She held up a hand. "Not yet. Give me one second before you start explaining."

Lysandra reached for her coat. "I should go."

"Stay if you want," Kaelith said, surprising all three of them. "I'm not the one who has somewhere else to be tonight."

"Kaelith, don't do this," Adrian said.

"Do what? Stand in my own bedroom?"

"Make this into a scene."

"There's already a scene, Adrian. I just walked into the middle of it."

Lysandra paused at the door anyway, her coat over her arm, studying Kaelith like she was a species she didn't recognize. "She's very composed," she said to Adrian, not to Kaelith, as if Kaelith weren't standing three feet away.

"She's always composed," Adrian said. "It's the only thing that she's good at."

"How long?" Kaelith asked, before the words could sink in.

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me."

"Eight months."

"Eight months." She said it back to him flat, testing the shape of it. "The anniversary dinner you forgot. Geneva, twice. All eight months."

"You knew?"

"I noticed. There's a difference. I noticed and I told myself I was imagining it, because the alternative was this conversation, and I wasn't ready to have it."

"Well, you're having it now," Adrian said. "So say something. Cry. Yell. Do something."

"What would you like me to do then, Adrian?"

"I don't know. Something that isn't this, this performance of being fine."

"It's not a performance."

"It's always a performance with you."

Lysandra let herself out. Neither of them stopped her. The front door clicked, and Adrian's voice shifted immediately into something rehearsed, businesslike, a register Kaelith recognized from every negotiation she'd ever watched him practice in the mirror.

"I've had the papers drawn up for three weeks," he said.

Kaelith's stomach dropped before her mind caught up. "Three weeks."

"I didn't know how to bring it up."

"You didn't know how to tell me you were leaving, but you knew exactly how to have the paperwork ready."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it? Three weeks, Adrian. Which dinners did I sit through, thinking we were fine, while you already knew?"

"I was trying to find the right time."

"There is no right time to let someone keep loving you after you've already decided to leave them."

"You want to talk about what's fair?" His jaw tightened; he hated being wrong more than he hated almost anything. "Let's talk about the last five years. What exactly did you contribute, Kaelith? I built the company. I closed every deal. I sat in every boardroom while you" He stopped himself. Too late.

"While I what?"

"While you stayed home."

"I stayed home because you asked me to. Because you said a wife who worked made you look like you couldn't provide. Do you remember saying that?"

"I don't remember it like that."

"Every time I mentioned going back to something, you found a reason it was a bad idea. This year, then next year, then the year after."

"That's not what happened."

"That's exactly what happened." Her voice cracked, just slightly, and she hated it. "You gave me nothing I couldn't have gotten without you. That's what you said. So tell me, what exactly did I take from you, that you're in such a hurry to get back?"

"You don't understand what it took to build what I built."

"I watched you build it, Adrian. Every late night. Every canceled vacation. I was there."

"Standing next to it isn't the same as building it."

"No. It isn't. But erasing the person standing next to you doesn't make you a better builder. It just makes you alone faster than you expected."

"Don't turn this into something poetic. It's a divorce, not a eulogy."

"It feels like one. Five years, and apparently I was furniture."

He didn't answer that. He crossed to his desk instead, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a folder that had clearly been sitting there, waiting, for longer than tonight.

"I'd rather we do this without lawyers screaming at each other," he said, setting the folder on the bed between them. "It's clean. I'm not trying to take anything from you."

"You already did."

"Kaelith—"

"You don't get to look wounded right now." She looked at the folder, then at him. "You had eight months to prepare for this. I had eight minutes."

"I never wanted to hurt you."

"You didn't want to be inconvenienced by hurting me.

That's different, Adrian, and you know it's different."

"So what do you want me to say?"

"I don't want you to say anything. I want you to listen, for once, to what you actually did." She stepped closer to the bed, closer to the folder she hadn't touched yet. "You didn't just cheat on me. You planned an exit. You built a document. You picked a night I made your favorite dinner to let me find out, because some part of you wanted me to see it happen instead of hearing it from you like a person who respected me enough to say it out loud."

"That's not—"

The doorbell cut him off, sharp and unexpected. Both of them turned toward the sound.

"Are you expecting someone?" she asked.

"No." Adrian's stillness told her he wasn't lying.

The bell rang again, more insistent. He moved toward the hallway; she followed, some instinct pulling her out of the bedroom she wouldn't be sleeping in again. When he opened the door, no one stood on the porch, just a black car idling at the curb, engine running, windows tinted too dark to see through.

"Adrian, do you know that car?"

"No." He shut the door, visibly rattled. "Probably a wrong address."

"You don't believe that any more than I do."

"Kaelith, not everything is about you."

"You're right. This isn't." She looked past him, out the window, at the car still sitting there. "This is about you, and whatever you've done that has strange cars parking outside our house at ten o'clock at night."

"I haven't done anything."

"Then why do you look like you're about to be sick?"

"Because my wife just caught me with another woman and now she's interrogating me about a parked car. Forgive me for not handling it gracefully."

"Is it Marcus? Did he send someone?"

"Why would Marcus send someone to our house?"

"You tell me. You're the one who looked like the floor dropped out from under him ten minutes ago."

"It's nothing, Kaelith. Drop it."

"You keep saying that. Nothing about tonight feels like nothing."

He didn't answer that either. She let it go, for now, and went back into the bedroom, picked up the folder from the bed, and opened it without asking permission.

"No alimony request," she read aloud. "No claim on the house. You built this whole thing assuming I'd fight you for money and a mortgage."

"Wouldn't you?"

"I'll sign it," she said.

He blinked. "Just like that?"

"Just like that."

"I thought you'd want to negotiate. Fight for something."

"There's nothing in here worth fighting for."

"Nothing? Not the house? Not the accounts?"

"You built this document assuming I'd want to keep pieces of a life I don't want anymore. I don't need the house, Adrian. I don't need your accounts."

"Then what do you need?"

"Nothing you can put in a folder."

"So that's it? Five years, and you're just going to sign?"

"What would you like me to do instead, Adrian? Beg you to stay with a woman who was in our bed an hour ago?"

"I didn't say beg."

"You didn't have to. You've been waiting all night for me to fall apart so you could feel less guilty about leaving. I'm not going to give you that."

His phone buzzed on the dresser, insistent, and he glanced at it the way a man glances at a fire he's hoping will put itself out on its own.

"Aren't you going to answer that?" she asked.

"It's nothing."

"It's your CFO. I can read the screen from here."

He snatched the phone up and turned his back to her, but not far enough. "Not now, Marcus." A pause. "I said not now." Another pause, longer, and something in his shoulders changed. "What do you mean pulled out? He can't just—" He caught Kaelith watching him and lowered his voice, walking toward the window. "We'll talk about it in the morning."

"Trouble?" Kaelith asked, when he hung up.

"It's business. It doesn't concern you."

"Everything about tonight concerns me, Adrian, whether you like it or not."

"An investor is making noise. It's handled."

"You don't sound like it's handled."

"You think this is easy for me?" he said again, louder, like repetition might make it truer. "You think I wanted any of this, the timing, the mess, you finding out like this?"

"I think you had three weeks to get comfortable with it, and I've had ten minutes." She closed the folder. "Tomorrow. In front of your lawyer. I want no confusion about how easy this was for me."

"Kaelith, wait—"

"You said I gave you nothing you couldn't have gotten without me." She picked the grocery bag back up off the bench, because leaving it felt like leaving a piece of herself in a house that had already stopped being hers. "I hope that's true, Adrian. Because you're about to find out exactly what it costs to lose the part of your life you never once bothered to look at closely enough to value."

"That's dramatic, even for you."

"Is it?" She stopped at the bedroom door and looked back at him, really looked, one last time. "You'll see."

"Kaelith. Come on. Don't leave it like this."

"How would you like me to leave it, Adrian? Warmly? Gratefully?"

"I don't know. Like two people who spent five years together."

"We didn't spend five years together. I spent five years making myself easy to live with. Those aren't the same thing, and I only just figured that out tonight."

"Kaelith, wait. Where are you even going to go tonight?"

"That's not your concern anymore."

"You don't have anywhere. You don't have anyone."

"That's what you'd like to believe, Adrian. It makes leaving easier."

She walked past him, down the hallway, past the front door where the black car had finally pulled away, and out into a night that felt, for the first time in five years, entirely her own.

Behind her, she heard him mutter something under his breath, not to her, not loud enough to catch every word. But she caught enough. Something about investors. Something about timing. Something that made it sound like his hurry to end this marriage had less to do with love than with money he thought he was protecting.

She didn't turn around to ask what he meant.

Her phone buzzed before she reached the end of the driveway. Unknown number.

We've been waiting for you to be ready, Ms. Sterling. Whenever you are, we're here.

She stared at the screen, thumb hovering, and typed back the only thing she could manage.

Who is this?

The reply came almost instantly.

Someone who's known your name a lot longer than your husband ever bothered to ask about it.

Kaelith stood on the sidewalk, phone glowing in her hand, and felt something she hadn't let herself feel in five years.

Recognition.

Somewhere behind her, a name was waiting in a drawer at her father's old estate, sitting quietly for the moment she was finally ready to pick it back up.

Tomorrow, she would sign the papers.

Tonight, for the first time since she was seventeen years old, Kaelith let herself think the word she'd buried the day she married him.

Sterling.