The conference room at Salazar & Associates smelled of old money, costly Italian leather, bitter espresso, and the quiet, sterile collapse of my marriage.
It was perched high above the city on the forty-second floor. Outside, a torrential autumn rain violently streaked down the floor-to-ceiling glass walls, blurring the Chicago skyline into a bruised wash of gray and steel. The storm rattled the thick panes, but inside the boardroom, the silence was suffocating.
I sat on one side of the long, polished mahogany table. I kept my hands folded neatly in my lap.
I was wearing a soft cream cardigan—simple, unbranded, unassuming—paired with dark slacks and sensible flats. Next to the aggressive, tailored silhouettes of the lawyers in the room, I looked exactly like what they thought I was: a girl who had stumbled out of the suburbs and into a world she could not comprehend.
There wasn’t a single piece of jewelry on my body. Not even the two-carat diamond wedding band I had removed three days prior and left sitting on the edge of Julian’s marble bathroom sink.
Across from me sat my husband. Julian Vance.
He looked exactly like the ambitious, cutthroat CEO of NovaLink he always claimed to be. He wore a navy Tom Ford suit tailored to the millimeter, pristine Italian leather oxfords that had never touched a puddle, and a silver Rolex Daytona gleaming aggressively under the recessed lighting. His dark hair was perfectly styled, and his jaw was set with a casual arrogance.
He possessed a smile sharp enough to slice through bone, and for two years, I had foolishly believed that smile belonged to me.
“Let’s keep this easy, Lily,” Julian said.
He pushed a thick, heavy stack of papers toward me. The sound of the thick parchment dragging across the polished mahogany felt colder than the rain outside.
“I’m tired. You’re tired,” he continued, leaning back and resting his hands behind his head. “We both know this marriage was a terrible investment from the start.”
A terrible investment.
I repeated the phrase softly in my head, my gaze locked on the bold, merciless words printed at the top of the document: DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE.
“Don’t start pretending you’re the victim here,” Julian sighed, rolling his eyes as if my silence was a personal inconvenience to him. “Let’s be brutally honest for once. When I met you, you were a barista pouring oat milk lattes at a corner shop in Wicker Park.
You smelled like roasted beans and vanilla syrup. I thought I was saving you. I thought you would be eternally grateful to become the wife of a rising tech CEO. But honestly… you were never meant for this echelon of society.”
His eyes dragged over me. The look was entirely devoid of the warmth he used to fake. He looked at me as if I were a cheap, thrift-store painting that someone had accidentally hung in the Louvre.
“You don’t know how to dress for a gala,” he listed off, checking his fingers. “You have absolutely zero networking skills. When I introduce you to venture capitalists, you talk about books instead of market caps. You’re just…”
He snapped his fingers in the air, searching for a word cruel enough to entertain himself.
“Dull. You’re a painfully dull woman, Lily.”
A light, breathy laugh floated in from the side of the room.
Chloe.
She was seated near the window in a crimson cocktail dress that had absolutely no place in a midday legal proceeding. Her legs were crossed, showcasing designer heels, and she was scrolling mindlessly on her phone. She was Julian’s mistress. And, as of two months ago, she was also the newly appointed ‘Creative Director’ of NovaLink.
“She really is dull, Julian,” Chloe agreed, not even bothering to lift her eyes from her glowing screen. “And she’s so uncreative. I mean, do you remember the dinner party last month? Who serves homemade beef stew to a board of marketing directors? It was humiliating. I had to order sushi from Nobu halfway through the night just to save your reputation.”
Julian laughed. It was a rich, booming sound. The exact same laugh that used to make my heart flutter when we lay in bed together on Sunday mornings. Now, the sound just made stomach acid burn the back of my throat.
