Below the headline was a massive, high-definition photograph. It was Vanessa. She was wearing a stunning, custom-tailored white suit, standing powerfully in front of the Sterling Global skyscraper, flanked by board members. She looked like a queen.
Ethan stared at the screen. His brain entirely short-circuited. He looked at the photograph. He looked at the termination letter. He looked at the foreclosure notice. The horrifying, catastrophic reality of what he had done slammed into him with the force of a freight train.
“Mom,” Ethan whispered, the phone slipping from his grasp and clattering onto the hardwood floor. “Vanessa… Vanessa isn’t a consultant. She’s… she’s Vanessa Sterling. She owns the company I work for. She owns the bank that holds our mortgage.”
Margaret stared at him, her jaw dropping open, the dish towel falling from her hands. The smug, controlling mother-in-law was suddenly confronted with a power so vast, so entirely out of her league, that it physically paralyzed her.
“We have to go to her,” Ethan babbled hysterically, grabbing his car keys. “We have to fix this! She’s my wife! I can apologize!”
Thirty minutes later, Ethan’s beat-up sedan pulled up to the towering, imposing wrought-iron gates of the Sterling Estate. The property was surrounded by ten-foot-high stone walls topped with security cameras.
But Ethan and Margaret weren’t alone at the gates.
My PR team had been very, very busy. Surrounding the entrance were a dozen local reporters, paparazzi, and financial journalists, tipped off that the newly revealed Sterling Heiress was about to make a public statement regarding her personal life. Flashbulbs popped blindingly in the late afternoon sun.
Ethan scrambled out of his car, sweating profusely, looking manic. He ran up to the massive iron gates, grabbing the bars and shaking them, shouting at the two heavily armed, impassive private security guards standing on the other side.
“Let me in!” Ethan screamed, his voice raw, waving his termination papers like a madman. “I am her husband! I demand to speak to my wife! Let me in!”
The heavy iron gates hummed with a deep electrical grind. They slowly parted, sliding open on their massive tracks. But they didn’t open to let him in.
I stepped out.
I was wearing a flawless, camel-colored designer trench coat over my white suit. I was flanked by Vance, my lead lawyer, and two massive, stone-faced bodyguards who looked ready to break Ethan in half if he breathed in my direction. I stopped ten feet from him. I didn’t look at him like a wife looking at a husband. I looked at him as if he were a piece of discarded trash on the pavement.
The cameras went absolutely wild.
