Harper Reed slammed her Birkin bag onto the café table. She looked like a storm cloud in a Yves Saint Laurent blazer.
"Where is he?" Harper demanded. "I will run him over. I have insurance."
Elinor sat in the corner booth, clutching a cup of hot water. She pushed a folded piece of paper across the table.
Harper snatched it up. Her eyes scanned the medical discharge summary.
"D&C? Yesterday?" Harper's voice rose an octave. "He wasn't there?"
Elinor typed on her phone. He was with Chanelle.
Harper slammed her hand on the table. People turned to look. She didn't care. "That son of a bitch. I'm going to sue him until he's living in a cardboard box."
Elinor shook her head. She reached into her tote bag and pulled out another file. This one was yellowed with age.
She slid it to Harper.
Harper opened it. She went still.
"Two years ago?" Harper whispered. She looked up, horror in her eyes. "You had a miscarriage two years ago?"
Elinor nodded. A single tear tracked down her cheek.
Harper read further. "Blunt force trauma to the abdomen? Elinor... did he hit you?"
Elinor typed. He was drunk. He pushed me. I fell into the counter.
"And you stayed," Harper said, her voice breaking. "And you let that witch Beverly call you barren."
I thought I was protecting him, Elinor typed. I thought it was love. Now I know it was just stupidity.
Harper reached across the table and grabbed Elinor's hand. Her grip was fierce.
"Listen to me," Harper said. "This isn't a divorce anymore. This is war. We are going to destroy him."
Elinor took a napkin. She wrote two words.
Total War.
"First step," Harper said, standing up. "We get your stuff. You are not sleeping under that roof again."
Elinor's phone lit up on the table. Hubby calling.
Elinor stared at it. Her finger hovered over the decline button.
Harper swiped the phone. She hit decline. Then she blocked the number.
"You're the strategist," Harper said, her eyes intense. "I'm just the weapon. I am your voice now."
Thirty minutes later, Harper's Range Rover screeched to a halt in the driveway of the Logan Estate.
Beverly was on the front lawn. Servants were carrying armfuls of Elinor's clothes and throwing them onto the grass.
"If you're leaving, leave!" Beverly shrieked. "Take your trash with you!"
Elinor looked at her clothes-dresses Julius had picked out, shoes he liked-scattered like garbage. She didn't move to pick them up.
She walked past the lawn, straight toward the detached garage.
"Where are you going?" Beverly yelled.
The garage door was locked. From inside, Elinor could hear a whirring sound. A mechanical grinding.
A shredder.
Panic flared in Elinor's chest. Her design archives. Her hard drives. The only part of her that had ever been truly free.
She pointed at the window.
Harper didn't hesitate. She grabbed a 9-iron from a golf bag lying on the grass.
Smash.
The glass shattered. Harper reached in and unlocked the door.
They burst inside.
Chanelle was there. She wasn't weak. She wasn't recovering. She was sitting in a plush armchair that had been brought into the dusty space, a cashmere blanket over her legs. Next to her, a tech-savvy young man was feeding blueprints into a commercial shredder's teeth while another worked on a laptop, wiping data.
She froze when she saw them.
Elinor lunged. She didn't scream. She just shoved the tech aside.
She grabbed the stack of external hard drives from the desk. She grabbed the remaining rolls of blueprints.
Chanelle smirked, smoothing her hair. "Garbage anyway. Just like you."
Elinor looked at the hard drive in her hand. The blue light was blinking. It was alive.
She looked at Chanelle with eyes that were absolute zero.
You have no idea what you just stole, Elinor thought. But you're about to find out.
