Astoria sat in the silence of her office, the muffled sounds of the city filtering through the glass. On her desk, the protein bar Gloria had left her sat untouched beside a coffee long since gone cold. Her phone buzzed once, a text from Isabella Montgomery lighting up the screen, checking in after seeing the latest press coverage.
She ignored it. She’d respond later when she had the energy to perform gratitude for concern that couldn’t actually help her. Instead, she pulled her laptop closer, losing herself in discovery motions and deposition prep until the cleaning crew arrived and the hallways went dark.
She never did respond to Isabella.
By the time Astoria pulled into her driveway, the sun had long since set and the text had been buried under a dozen work emails she’d answered before finally admitting the day was over. She’d respond tomorrow, but probably not.
The house was dark when she unlocked the door, same as she’d left it that morning. No lights on timers, no one home to flip a switch. She moved through the shadows by muscle memory, dropping her keys on the entry table and her bag on the kitchen counter beside the dinner she’d reheated and forgotten to eat before leaving for work. It was still sitting there, congealed and cold.
She should throw it out and eat something else, but she simply walked past it to her home office and opened her laptop again.
The case files were waiting for her, transferred from her work computer to her personal drive. She’d already read through them at least a dozen times since Gerald had sent them, butshe needed to know every detail, every contradiction in Valerie’s narrative, every piece of evidence that proved she wasn’t the monster her ex-wife had painted her to be.
The laptop screen illuminated the room in pale blue-white light, and through the window, the ocean was a dark expanse broken only by the distant sweep of the lighthouse beam cutting through the spring night.
She hunkered down and read the documents her attorney had prepared. Email chains where Valerie had undermined her to board members in language just deniable enough to seem innocent, calendar entries Valerie had changed without asking that isolated Astoria from colleagues under the guise of protecting her time, and financial records showing accounts Valerie had tried to control and purchases made to establish a pattern of shared assets that had never actually been shared.
They’d spent six months excavating the wreckage of her marriage and organizing it into neat, producible evidence to build the case.
And now, there was a new audience for Valerie’s performance.
Astoria navigated to the browser tab she’d left open, though she’d meant to close it hours ago, and Miller Scott’s photo filled the screen.
Research, she reminded herself.Know your opponent.
She sat there in the dark home office, the ocean murmuring beyond the glass, and thought about what Rachel Hartwell and Miller Scott would see on Tuesday. Would they see the ice queen? The controlling wife? The villain Valerie had spent six months engineering from curated details and strategic tears?
Memories of the Phoenix Ridge Pride Gala intruded. Valerie’s hand was on her arm, her manicured nails digging just hard enough to bruise where no one could see. Valerie’s laugh, bright and charming, filled the space, as she told their circleabout Astoria’s “adorable” inability to connect with people.“She’s lucky she has me to handle the human side of things. Left to her own devices, she’d probably just send spreadsheets and call it networking.”
Everyone had laughed because Valerie made it sound fond, like a joke between loving spouses, and Astoria had stood there with that practiced smile frozen on her face while something inside her finally, irreparably cracked.
She’d filed for divorce the next morning.
Astoria closed the laptop, and the darkness was immediate, the ocean somehow louder without the screen’s glow. She sat motionless, letting her eyes adjust, feeling the emptiness of the house settle around her.
No one was coming home. No one was waiting awake for her to finish working. No one would ask about her day or notice if she didn’t eat or care if she sat here until dawn building defenses against a woman who had already taken fifteen years of her life.
She was alone, had been alone for six months, and before that, she’d been alone in a different way, the kind of alone you could be while sharing a bed with someone who made you feel small.
But she’d learned that being alone was safer. It meant nobody could use her softness against her.
She stood, her joints stiff from sitting too long, and made her way through the dark house to a bedroom she still wasn’t used to sleeping in.
On Tuesday, Valerie’s new attorneys would look across the table expecting to see a monster. And Astoria was determined to give them nothing at all.
3
Chapter 3: Miller
The mediator’s conference room was aggressively neutral with its beige walls, abstract art that no one would remember, and chairs that probably cost more than Miller’s monthly rent. She’d been in dozens of rooms like this, built to feel impartial and above the fray. But this one had harbor views through floor-to-ceiling windows and a polish to everything that whispered money even while trying to say nothing at all.
She’d noticed Rachel noticing, too, when they’d arrived thirty minutes early to set up, a slight raise of the eyebrows, nothing more. Hartwell & Associates did well enough, but this was a different tier.
Now Miller sat with her legal pad ready, documents organized in the folder before her, watching Valerie fidget with her water glass across the table. They’d prepped for this. Rachel had walked them both through the strategy: start high on the settlement demands, gauge flexibility, and see if there was any path to resolution before this turned into an all-out war.
Valerie had arrived in a quiet panic, hugging Miller in the hallway like they were old friends rather than attorney and client. “Thank you for being here,” she’d whispered, and Miller had squeezed her arm and promised they had this handled.
She believed it too. She’d spent the last eight days buried in files and financials, building their understanding of the case brick by brick. She knew what they were asking for and why it was justified. She knew Valerie’s contributions to Shepry Global had been systematically erased, her confidence shredded by years of subtle cruelty.
