Chapter 17 - What the Law Did
The divorce petition was filed Monday morning.
Our prenuptial agreement had always protected Solstice; my mother’s lawyers had seen to that years before I ever met Lucan, and I had never had cause to be more grateful for a document I’d signed without much thought.
Lucan eventually pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy.
He repaid part of what he had taken and received a prison sentence.
Lavinia cooperated in exchange for a reduced charge, and kept herself out of prison, but lost her career and her professional license — the license, it turned out, mattering more to her in the end than the man she’d worn my earrings for.
Bellweather recovered the rest of the money through civil judgments.
None of it was dramatic.
It was slow, and procedural, and documented, and it was, for exactly those reasons, absolutely final.
There was no version of it he could charm or shout his way out of, because I had built the whole thing out of the one material my husband had never learned to manipulate: verifiable fact.
I attended none of the criminal proceedings.
I want to note that, because people expect that I would have wanted to watch — to see Lucan brought low in a courtroom, to sit in the front row and let him see me there.
I felt no such urge.
I had already watched him fall, once, thoroughly, under the blue lights of a ballroom, and I did not need to watch it again in a courthouse.
The revenge, if you want to call it that, had never been the point; the revenge was only ever a byproduct.
The point was the extraction of myself and eight hundred employees from a man who had been quietly bleeding all of us.
Once that extraction was complete, Lucan became simply a legal process happening elsewhere, to a person I used to know, and I found I had no appetite to spectate.
My lawyers handled the divorce.
The prosecutors handled the crime.
And I handled the only thing that was ever truly mine to handle, which was the rebuilding of a life and a company that a charming, hollow man had spent years quietly emptying out.
He got his sentence.
May you like
I got my life.
Of the two of us, I have never once doubted who came out ahead.
