Chapter 3

My father's estate sat on a cliff overlooking the Pacific—forty rooms, a private vineyard, and enough security to guard a small country. When I stepped off the jet, he was waiting on the tarmac, flanked by two assistants and his chief legal counsel, Margaret Zhou.

He looked older. Three years apart had deepened the lines around his eyes. But the moment he saw my belly, his composure cracked, and he pulled me into his arms.

"My girl," he murmured. "I should have come sooner."

"I should have called sooner."

He held me at arm's length, studying my face. Whatever he saw there—the exhaustion, the tear-stained cheeks, the hard new edge in my eyes—made his jaw tighten. "Tell me everything."

Over dinner, I did. Every humiliation. Every time Julian chose Naomi. Every cruel word from his mother, Victoria Ashford, who had once told me at Thanksgiving, "You're pretty enough, Sera, but pretty fades. Breeding doesn't."

By the time I finished, my father hadn't touched his food. Margaret was already taking notes.

"I want nothing from him," I said firmly. "No alimony, no settlement. I just want a clean divorce and full custody."

My father set down his glass. "You'll have that. But Sera, the Ashfords have been trying to land a contract with Castellano Industries for two years. Julian's father, Richard, has called my office eleven times."

I stared at him. "You're joking."

"I declined every meeting. I didn't know why my instincts told me to avoid them." He smiled grimly. "Now I do."

Margaret slid a folder across the table. "Julian filed a prenup that's heavily in his favor—standard for someone who believed he held all the financial power in the marriage. But since the marriage involved fraud—specifically, his ongoing affair with Naomi Hale, which predates your wedding by six months—the prenup is contestable."

"Six months?" My voice cracked. "He was with her before we got married?"

Margaret nodded. "Hotel records, flight manifests, jewelry receipts. My team pulled everything in the last four hours."

Six months. That meant when Julian stood at the altar and said *I do*, Naomi was already wearing a bracelet he'd bought her in Paris.

I excused myself and threw up in the bathroom.

When I came back, my father's expression had shifted from anger to something colder—calculation.

"Here's what's going to happen," he said. "You're going to rest. You're going to have this baby surrounded by people who love you. And when you're ready, Julian Ashford is going to learn that the woman he discarded is the sole heir to everything he's been groveling to access."

"I don't want revenge, Dad."

"This isn't revenge, Sera." He leaned forward. "This is consequence."

That night, lying in a bedroom larger than Julian's entire apartment, I scrolled through my phone one last time.

Julian had posted a photo—him and Naomi at a rooftop restaurant, her head on his shoulder, champagne in hand. The caption: *New chapter. ❤️*

Two hundred comments. All congratulations.

Not a single person asked about me.

I closed the app and placed my phone face-down.

Then I opened my laptop, logged into the shared cloud account Julian never bothered to change the password for, and downloaded everything.

Every photo. Every receipt. Every message between him and Naomi.

Including one sent the night before our wedding: *"Don't worry, baby. She's just the placeholder. Give me a year, and it'll be you and me. —J"*

My hands didn't shake this time.

I forwarded everything to Margaret.