Rachel, who had been standing quietly by the industrial sink, gasped aloud and covered her mouth.
Nicole didn’t gasp. She didn’t flinch. With the precision of an athlete, she picked up her full glass of iced water from the counter and hurled it straight into Alex’s face.
The water splashed across his forehead, drenching his slicked-back hair, dripping down the lapels of his custom Brioni suit, and soaking the legal envelope lying on the granite.
Madison shrieked. “Are you insane?! Alex, call security! Have this psycho thrown out!”
Alex stood motionless, water dripping from his chin, his eyes wide and dark with shock. “Nicole…”
“You disgusting, pathetic coward,” Nicole said, her voice shaking with pure, unadulterated fury. “You invited me here tonight thinking I’d help you convince Rebecca to accept being tucked away like dirty laundry? You thought because I’m your sister, I’d sit here and nod while you ask the woman who stood by you when you were nothing to become your paid prisoner?”
“It’s seventy million dollars, Nicole!” Alex roared, wiping water from his eyes with his sleeve. “Most women in Chicago would cut their own throats for that kind of security!”
“I am not most women,” I said.
My voice was quiet, but it cut through the shouting like a razor through raw silk.
Alex froze. He looked at me, his chest heaving.
I walked slowly around the counter until I stood directly in front of him. I didn’t yell. I didn’t throw water. I looked him dead in the eye—the man who had held me on our wedding night in Paris and promised that no storm on earth would ever shake the foundation of what we built.
“You think this is about money, Alex?” I asked him, gesturing to the lavish kitchen, the sprawling mansion, the wet legal contract sitting on the counter. “You think you can buy my dignity for seventy million dollars?”
“Rebecca, be realistic,” he pleaded, reaching out again. “You don’t have a corporate background. You don’t know the wolves waiting at the door. If I go under, you go under. The baby goes under.”
“I survived twenty-three years before I ever saw a dime of your money, Alex,” I said, my voice hardening into iron. “I worked thirty-hour weeks at an art gallery while finishing my master’s degree. I lived in a five-hundred-square-foot studio apartment in Pilsen where the radiator clanked all night. I was happy there. I was whole there.”
I looked over his shoulder at Madison, who was now smirking, twirling a strand of her bleached-blonde hair.
“You think you’re taking something valuable from me, Madison?” I said directly to her.
Madison blinked, surprised that I was addressing her. “I’m taking his future, sweetie. You’re just his past.”
“Take him,” I replied without hesitation. “Take the late-night panic attacks when his credit lines tighten. Take the paranoia that someone is always wiretapping his phone. Take the hollow excuses when he forgets your birthday because he’s entertaining city aldermen at three in the morning. Take him, because the man standing in this room isn’t the man I married. He’s just a hollow shell with a black card and an expensive tailor.”
Alex’s face drained of what little color it had left. “Rebecca, stop. Don’t say things you can’t take back.”
“I’m not taking anything back, Alex,” I said. “And I’m certainly not signing your contract.”
I turned my back on him and looked at Rachel.
“Rachel, could you please go up to my dressing room and pack my black duffel bag? Just the clothes that fit over my stomach, my comfortable sneakers, and the ultrasound albums from the bedside table.”
Rachel nodded immediately, tears shining in her eyes. “Right away, Mrs. Hayes.”
“Rachel, don’t you dare move,” Alex commanded, his billionaire authority snapping into place. “You work for me. You live on my payroll.”
Rachel stopped at the foot of the kitchen stairs. She was thirty years old, a single mother who had worked in this home for four years, enduring the gradual erosion of peace as Madison invaded our lives. She turned around, looked Alex straight in the eyes, and unpinned her silver household pass from her uniform apron.
She dropped it into the stainless-steel trash can with a crisp, echoing *clink*.
“I work for Mrs. Hayes,” Rachel said with quiet dignity. “And as of right now, Mr. Hayes, I quit.”
Before Alex could speak, Rachel hurried up the back staircase.
Alex turned to me, his panic finally breaking through his arrogant facade. “Rebecca, you are seven months pregnant! Where do you think you’re going? You can’t just walk out of this house!”
“Watch me,” I said.
