All Chapters of The Divorce That Made Me A Billionaire : Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

VICTORIAHe didn't deny it.That was the thing that stayed with me even after I hung up the phone. Not the details he gave or even the weak excuses he tried to pass off as explanations. Just the fact that he didn't deny it.It was the second time in this whole process that my father had failed to deny something. And I noticed that. I noticed the pattern and the way it made me feel, alongside everything else I had come to understand about the kind of man he was.I was still in the back of my car when I called him. The city looked normal outside the window and I just sat there, voice steady, as I listened to him try to explain the thing he had allowed to happen.He said he hadn't done it himself. He said he hadn't known it would go that far. He said he hadn't known the compound would actually be used. He had known there was a plan to get Sarah out of his life, and he had looked the other way without asking how it was going to happen.He had already been in love with Margaret before my m

VICTORIAThen Diana began to talk.She had stayed with Trent, off and on, through all of it. Through the pregnancy that had complicated everything. Through the legal back and forth. Through the slow process of watching the man she had convinced herself she loved start to fall apart in front of her.She had been present for conversations. She had heard things she hadn't fully understood at the time. And now, with everything moving toward something she could no longer pretend wasn't happening, she had picked up the phone.What she told me was this: Trent's lawyers hadn't walked away because he was giving up. They had walked away because he had told them to. He had decided to stop fighting in court altogether. And in place of that, he had put together something else entirely, a plan that had no lawyers, no judges, and no courtroom component at all.He was going to move the contested assets tonight.He wasn’t going through any legal channel, but through a private financial deal with a buy

VICTORIA I didn't sleep. I lay in the dark with Clark beside me, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. The three words from the unknown number just kept going around and around in my head, like something I kept picking up and turning over, trying to find the angle that made sense. She's still alive. She. It wasn’t a warning or a threat. It wasn’t even some message about what was coming next. It was a statement about a person. A woman. Someone who was supposed to be dead, or at least someone everyone believed was dead. My first thought was Sylvie Rhodes. But that didn't fit. Sylvie wasn't supposed to be dead. Everyone already knew she had survived. The court hearing had made that public. My second thought went somewhere else entirely, and I shut it down so fast it was almost like flinching. My mother. I shut it down again. I told myself it was impossible. Franklin Adler had shown me everything. The death certificate, the doctor's notes, the full timeline. Sarah Hale had died seven

VICTORIA Clark's face went pale. He didn’t look like it came from bad news or stress. This was different. I knew whatever was on that screen had taken him by shock, and Clark Sterling was not a man who got shocked. He read the message twice. Then he set the phone face-down on the table slowly, like he was trying to buy himself a few seconds before he had to deal with whatever came next. I crossed the room before he could say anything and picked it up. He didn't stop me. The screen showed a photograph. It had no caption, no name, and no number attached to it, just the image sent from a contact that showed up as nothing but a string of digits. It was a woman. She was sitting upright in a room that looked like a hospital—clean white walls, a plain chair, a window with light coming through it at an angle. Her face was turned slightly away from the camera, like she didn't know the picture was being taken or like she had learned a long time ago not to look directly at anythin

VICTORIAFranklin Adler's office was on the thirty-first floor of a building in Midtown, and by the time I arrived the next morning, I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours.But I didn't show it. I had learned that particular skill a long time ago—how to walk into a room looking like I had my full weight behind me even when I was running on nothing. I sat down across from Franklin, straightened my jacket, and put every document on the desk in front of him.The transfer records. The trust linked to the shell account. The billing records from the clinic in Albany. My father's signature at the bottom of the trust agreement. And underneath that, on a separate sheet, the name Celestine Vare with a line I had drawn in red connecting it to the trust.Franklin was sixty-two years old and had been an estates lawyer for nearly four decades. He had seen enough ugly things done by rich people to their families that almost nothing rattled him anymore.He looked at everything I put in front of him