He got nothing. The apartment stayed mine. The marriage was annulled with a speed that reflected exactly how indefensible his position was once his own voice was in evidence. And the receipts he’d so carefully kept — the ones meant to be his weapon — became, in my attorney’s hands, just more proof of premeditation.
Lorna fared no better, socially, which for a woman like Lorna is the only currency that matters. The recording, once played to twenty people, did not stay among twenty people. The woman who’d spent a lifetime performing respectability, who’d sneered at my grandmother’s flat and called my father a nobody, was revealed to her entire world as someone who’d conspired to rob her son’s bride on the wedding night. There is no book club, no charity board, no social circle that recovers from that. She’d wanted everyone to know who made the decisions. Everyone found out instead who she really was.
I didn’t have to do anything cruel. I just pressed play, and let the Whitmores be exactly as loud as they’d been when they thought no one was listening.
Chapter 5: The Woman Who Kept the Apartment
That was two years ago.
I have the apartment on the coast. I live in it now, actually — the wedding present that was meant to be the instrument of my ruin became the first home of my new life. I sit on the balcony my ex-husband planned to steal, and I watch the water, and I feel nothing but free. Grayson wanted me to have something of my own so he could take it. I have it. He has nothing. The universe has a sense of humor, and occasionally it is on your side.
