All Chapters of The Divorce That Made Me A Billionaire : Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

VICTORIAI had been rehearsing the conversation in my head since three in the morning.And it was because I didn't know what I wanted to say. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I had mapped it out word for word while Clark slept and the city outside was still dark and quiet. The problem wasn't the words. The problem was me, because every time I ran through it in my head, I could feel my chest tightening and my throat closing up like I was about to cry. So I sat there and ran through it again and again until the feeling stopped.By six AM, I was ready. I made coffee. Then I sat at the kitchen table and called my father. He picked up on the third ring, which told me he had been awake too."Victoria," he said. His voice sounded careful like he was bracing for something."Hi, Dad," I said. I kept my voice flat, not cold. Just flat. I had decided that I wasn’t going to shout. I wasn’t going to cry. I was going to give him the facts and wait.He started with denial. I had expected that.

VICTORIAThe conference room they gave us was small and it smelled of old coffee.I didn't care. I sat down, pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, and got to work.Serena was on my left with her notes spread across the table. Two of her associates were already pulling up documents on their laptops. Isabella sat across from me. Clark was by the window, standing with his arms crossed, which was what he did when he was paying close attention and didn't want to get in the way.Elio was on the screen. We had set up the video call as soon as we got into the room."Dr. Emil Bauer," I said. "Tell me everything."Elio had already been running searches since the name came up in court. He shared his screen and walked us through what he had found.Bauer had been a practicing psychiatrist for thirty-one years. On paper, he was perfectly clean. He had published papers, institutional connections, and a private practice upstate. Nothing unusual.But Elio had gone deeper."I’m cross-referencing everythin

VICTORIA It started with an iPad. Clark had pulled up the updated financial trail Elio sent over and was walking me through it. He was standing close, close enough that when I turned my head to look at the screen, we were about six inches apart. Neither of us moved. He looked at me. I looked at him. The room was quiet. The city outside was doing its usual late-night thing—low traffic, the occasional far-off siren—but in this room, right now, everything was very still. I said his name, not as a question, but an invitation. He set the iPad down. We had been carefully not doing this for weeks. Both of us knew it. We worked together constantly and somewhere along the way, working together had started to feel like something else. He knew how I liked my coffee. I knew when he was about to push back on something before he even opened his mouth. We had kissed a few times and had sex maybe twice or so, and we had always walked away and acted like it hadn't happened. Neither of us had ev

VICTORIAI closed the file and set my phone face down on the desk. Clark was still working on the other side of the table. He hadn't looked up.I picked up my coffee, took a sip even though it had gone cold, and kept my face exactly as it was.The first reaction was almost never the right one. I had learned that the hard way more than once. When Trent first hit me, my first reaction was to go quiet and make myself smaller and pretend it hadn't happened. It happened again anyway. When I found out about Diana, my first reaction was immediate grief, which had been raw but completely useless at the moment. Neither of those reactions had helped me. What helped me was waiting, letting the first wave of emotions pass, and then deciding, with a clear head and actual information in front of me, on what I wanted to do.So I sat there, said nothing, and kept working.At 8 AM, I got up, showered, and put on the grey blazer I had set out the night before. I went to the kitchen and started making

VICTORIAI got home and went straight to my office. I didn't turn on all the lights, just the desk lamp. I sat down and put the folder on the desk in front of me and left it there, closed.I didn't open it again. I didn't need to. I had already read it enough times in my head on the way home. Clark Sterling was the name of the registered agent. His signature and his handwriting were there too.I sat there for a long time and just let my mind go back through everything.Every meeting we had ever been in together. Every time something important happened in a room and Clark happened to be there when it did. Every time a deal came through that I hadn't expected, or a threat backed off a little faster than it should have. Every time I had looked at him and thought, this person is on my side.I thought about the last night we spent together. Not with regret, exactly. Regret wasn't the right word. It was more like I had opened a door I didn't usually open, and now that door was wide and the