All Chapters of After Divorce, I Became the Architect of his Downfall : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Serena's POV The blueprint blurred in front of me for the third time in an hour.I blinked hard and forced my eyes back to the load-bearing calculations on my screen, but my mind kept drifting to the four-year-old folder buried on my personal drive. “S_COLE_FINAL_v12”. I hadn't opened it in three weeks. I didn't need to. I could see every line of that design with my eyes closed, the way you remember the shape of a person's face after they've been gone a long time."You're doing the thing again," Priya said, dropping into the chair across from my desk without asking. She was the only other person at Halloran & Pierce who'd noticed I had a tell. "The staring-at-nothing thing.""I'm working.""You're somewhere else entirely. I can tell because you haven't touched your coffee and it's been sitting there since nine." She nodded at the cup. "What's going on with you?"I almost told her. The words sat right behind my teeth, “I submitted something four years ago and I still haven't heard bac

Serena's POV The hotel room smelled like industrial carpet cleaner and nothing else, which was somehow worse than if it had smelled like anything at all.I'd been here four days. I knew this because there were four toothbrush wrappers in the trash can by the bathroom sink, and I'd started using that as my only reliable measure of time passing, since everything else about the last week had blurred into one long gray smear. I hadn't gone back to the penthouse. I hadn't called Ethan. I'd called in sick to work twice and then stopped calling at all, just let my phone sit face-down on the nightstand collecting messages I wasn't ready to read.On the fifth morning I woke up and made myself shower, and something about the hot water finally cut through the fog enough to remind me that I still had a life to attend to, whether I felt like it or not.I sat at the small desk by the window with my laptop open and stared at the cursor blinking in an empty email draft. “Subject: S. Cole — Identity

Serena's POV The porch light was already on when I pulled into the driveway, which meant my mother had either been expecting someone or simply hadn't gone to bed yet, and I sat in the car for a moment trying to remember if I'd called ahead.I hadn't. I had no memory of deciding to come here at all.I climbed out on legs that still didn't feel entirely mine and walked up the path I'd walked a thousand times as a teenager, past the same crooked porch step my father had always meant to fix and never did, and knocked before I could talk myself out of it.Helen opened the door in her robe, reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and the moment she saw my face she didn't ask a single question. She just opened the door wider and pulled me inside by the wrist, the way she used to when I was small and had skinned a knee, like words could wait until the damage was somewhere warm."Sit," she said, steering me toward the kitchen table. "I'm putting the kettle on.""Mom, I don't need—""I didn't

Serena's POV The blue light of my laptop screen illuminated the dark kitchen, casting a cold glow over the brass compass resting on the table. My finger tapped the trackpad over and over, but the screen remained locked behind a sterile, flashing red error message: Access Denied. Internal Network Restriction. Four years of design notes, material formulas, and structural revisions—the entire digital blueprint of my professional identity—had been replaced by a single, unyielding wall of code. "They're scrubbing me," I whispered, the words getting trapped behind a sudden, suffocating tightness in my throat. "Serena?" my mother called out, stepping back into the kitchen with a fresh blanket wrapped around her shoulders. "What is it? What did the email say?" "Marcus didn't just lock my office door, Mom," I said, my voice rising slightly before I forced it back down into a tense, steady rhythm. "He filed an emergency corporate injunction claiming that everything on my personal cloud dri

Serena's POV A thin layer of sea salt had dried across my windshield, turning the morning sun into a blinding, fractured glare that made my eyes sting. I shoved the phone back into the cup holder, the headline about Diana and the Voss Group burning behind my retinas like a fresh brand.My knuckles were stark white against the steering wheel, the skin cracked from the ocean wind and the bitter, cheap soap of a gas station restroom. I looked down at the loose change I had scraped from the floor mats—exactly three crumpled singles and a handful of dull quarters resting on my father’s old ledger."Fourteen dollars," I rasped, my throat raw as I forced the sputtering engine to turn over one more time. "Fourteen dollars to my name, and they’re already building on my father’s grave."The car limped down the steep, potholed hill into Crestfield’s harbor district, stopping outside a low-slung, weathered brick building with a faded sign: Ashby Marine Logistics. The paint was peeling in thick c