Chapter 4: Nothing

Serena's POV

The courtroom was colder than I expected, and I spent the first ten minutes of the proceeding fixated on that instead of anything that actually mattered, because focusing on the temperature was easier than focusing on Diana walking up to the witness stand in a soft gray dress, looking like she'd been personally styled for sympathy.

"Ms. Marchetti," Ethan's attorney began, "can you describe your relationship to the petitioner?"

"She's my cousin." Diana's voice caught slightly on the word, just enough to sound unrehearsed. "We grew up together. She's like a sister to me."

I sat beside Priscilla at the opposite table, my hands folded in my lap, and made myself breathe slowly through my nose. Like a sister.

I'd shared a bedroom with her every summer until I was fourteen. I'd cried into her shoulder at my father's funeral. I'd stood beside her at her own wedding three years ago before she got divorced and meant every word of the toast I gave.

"And is that why this has been so difficult for you?" the attorney asked. "Coming forward with this information?"

"Yes." Diana looked down at her hands, then back up, her eyes glassy. "I didn't want to be here. I want that on the record. I've spent months hoping I wouldn't have to say any of this out loud."

"But you felt you had to."

"I felt like Ethan deserved the truth. And I think, somewhere, Serena does too, even if she can't see that right now."

I gripped the edge of my chair hard enough that my knuckles went pale, and Priscilla's hand found my forearm under the table, a small, steadying pressure. “Don't react,” she'd told me that morning. “Whatever she says, your face stays still. That's the only thing you control in that room.”

"Can you tell the court what Serena told you, in her own words, about her relationship with Adrian Cole?"

And then it started — a story so detailed, so carefully constructed, that for one disorienting moment I almost doubted my own memory of the last two years. Diana described a conversation that had never happened, in a coffee shop I'd never been to with her, where I supposedly confessed to feelings for a man I'd shared maybe a dozen professional lunches with, always in groups, never alone. She gave dates. She gave details about how I'd supposedly described his hands, his voice, the way he listened to me in a way Ethan didn't anymore.

"She asked me not to tell Ethan," Diana said, her voice trembling beautifully. "She made me promise. I've felt sick about it every single day since."

I wanted to stand up and scream that none of it was real, that I'd never said those words because there was nothing to say, that Adrian Cole probably didn't even remember my last name. Instead I sat perfectly still, the way Priscilla had told me to, and felt the courtroom absorb every fabricated word as fact.

"One more question," the attorney said. "Did Serena ever express any feelings about the Voss family's financial position?"

"She used to say she felt suffocated by it," Diana said quietly. "That she sometimes wondered what she'd build for herself if she ever left. I didn't understand at the time that she meant it so literally."

It was almost funny, in the way nothing is actually funny anymore once you've lost too much in too short a time. The one true thing buried in her testimony — that I'd built something entirely my own, entirely outside Ethan's world — had been twisted into evidence that I'd been planning my exit the whole time, calculating my financial position like the marriage was a transaction I'd been quietly auditing.

When Jade took the stand an hour later, I almost didn't recognize her voice.

"Did Serena ever mention Adrian Cole to you?"

"Sometimes," Jade said carefully. "In passing. Work stuff, mostly."

"Did she seem emotionally distant in her marriage, in your observation?"

"I mean—" Jade glanced at me once, quickly, then away. "Sometimes. She kept a lot to herself. I always figured that was just her personality, but looking back, I don't know. Maybe there was more going on than I realized."

Every word of it was technically true. That was the worst part. Jade hadn't lied a single time on that stand, and somehow that made the damage land deeper than Diana's outright fabrications, because there was no clean way to call it dishonest. She'd simply taken eight years of genuine friendship and handed it over in pieces, shaped exactly the way someone else needed it shaped.

"Serena," Priscilla murmured to me during the recess, her voice low and even, "I need you to prepare yourself. This is not going well."

"I know."

"The judge is going to weigh credibility heavily here, and right now we don't have anything concrete to counter the narrative they've built. I'll do what I can in cross, but I want you to understand the realistic range of outcomes before we go back in."

I nodded because I couldn't make myself say anything else.

The ruling came two hours later, and I heard it the way you hear something underwater — muffled, delayed, arriving a half-second after it should have. Settlement in Ethan's favor. No claim to the penthouse. No portion of the assets we'd built together over three years. My savings, my car, my name — that was what I walked out with, the full inventory of everything four years of marriage had apparently amounted to.

I signed the papers at the table because Priscilla put the pen in my hand and told me gently that it was time, and my signature came out smaller and shakier than I'd ever seen it look.

Ethan didn't look at me once during any of it. Not when the ruling was read, not when I signed, not when I stood to leave. He kept his eyes on the table in front of him like there was something written there worth all his attention, and I understood, watching him do it, that this was its own kind of answer — that some part of him knew exactly what had just happened in that room and couldn't bear to witness his own part in it directly.

Diana was waiting in the hallway when I walked out, visible through the glass doors before I even reached them, composed and unhurried, like she had nowhere else she needed to be.

She didn't smile. She didn't need to.

I walked past her without a word and out into the cold afternoon light, and somewhere behind me I heard the soft click of her heels following at an unhurried distance, like she had all the time in the world to watch me go.

I made it to the bench outside the courthouse before my legs simply stopped agreeing to carry me any further.

I sat down. The cold of the stone seeped through my coat almost instantly, but I didn't move, didn't reach for my phone, didn't do anything except sit there with my hands in my lap and let the full weight of the day finally land on me all at once — the marriage, the money, the home, the friend, the four years of work still frozen behind a complaint I couldn't fight, all of it arriving together like a wave that had been building since the moment I opened that bedroom door.

I don't know how long I sat there.

Long enough that the light started to change, long enough that my hands went numb from the cold, long enough that when I finally stood up and walked to my car, I didn't have a single clear thought about where I was going.

I got in, started the engine, and pulled out of the parking garage without a destination in mind.

Two hours later, somewhere in the gathering dark, I realized my hands had been steering toward my mother's house the entire time without my permission — and on the passenger seat beside me, untouched since the night Ethan handed it to me, the divorce envelope sat exactly where I'd left it, still sealed, still unread, riding along with me toward the one place I hadn't let myself go since all of this began.