All Chapters of Divorced, Now Watch Me Rise: Chapter 11 - Chapter 13

I didn’t wear blue.I wore black. Simple, sharp, one of my own designs. My mother’s scarf was tied around my wrist, faded blue silk, the only blue he was going to get from me.The taxi dropped me at the gate at 7:58.A new guard opened it. Young, unsmiling. Mr. Harris was gone. I wondered if Richard had found out about the envelope, and the thought made me cold.The Cole mansion hadn’t changed.Same iron gates. Same white columns. Same long table in the dining room where I’d spent three years of Sundays passing the salt to the man who destroyed my mother.Richard Cole stood when I walked in.He was sixty-eight now, silver-haired, still handsome in the way powerful men stay handsome long after they stop being kind. He smiled warmly. He’d always been good at warm.“Elena. Look at you.” He pulled out my chair. “Milan suits you.”I didn’t sit down. “You know where I’ve been.”“I make it my business to know things.” He sat, unbothered, and poured two glasses of red wine. “Please. I’m not g

“Absolutely not,” Margaret said.It was eight in the morning. She was sitting across from me at my kitchen counter, still in her coat, her coffee untouched. Alexander stood by the window with his arms crossed. Neither of them had slept much. Neither had I.“I’m not going to sign anything,” I said. “I’m going to pretend I will.”“Richard Cole has been lying for a living for forty years, Elena. He will know.”“He won’t. Because he thinks he already knows me.” I turned my cup slowly between my hands. “To him, I’m still the quiet girl who passed him the salt every Sunday. He thinks Milan was a phase. He thinks two million dollars is more money than I can imagine.”Margaret looked at Alexander. “Tell her this is insane.”“It’s insane,” Alexander agreed. “It’s also the only door we have.”Margaret closed her eyes for a long second. When she opened them, the lawyer was back.“Rules,” she said. “You do not sign anything. Not a napkin. Not a guest book. If he puts a pen in your hand, you find