Paola walked to the stand, keeping her head high, though her hands were shaking. She took the oath and sat down.
Vance approached her. “Mrs. Blackwood, could you explain your relationship with the plaintiff, Diego Reyes?”
“We were coworkers,” Paola said softly. “And we had a brief… romantic entanglement.”
“And during this time, did the defendant, Laura Reyes, reach out to you?”
“Yes,” Paola lied smoothly. “She found out about the affair and began stalking me. She threatened to ruin my marriage if I didn’t help her frame Diego. She told me she was going to pretend the baby was his, drain his accounts, and make sure he was fired.”
I stared at her in disbelief. The sheer audacity of the lie was breathtaking.
“Thank you,” Vance said. “Your witness.”
Maria Vargas walked up to the stand, a terrifyingly serene expression on her face.
“Mrs. Blackwood,” Maria said gently. “You are under oath. You understand that, correct?”
“I do.”
“You claim Laura Reyes stalked you. Do you have any proof? Text messages? Emails? Voicemails?”
“She was very careful,” Paola said. “She did it all in person.”
“I see,” Maria noted. “Mrs. Blackwood, who is paying for Arthur Vance’s legal fees today?”
Vance shot up. “Objection! Relevance!”
“It goes to witness bias and motivation, Your Honor,” Maria countered.
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said. “Answer the question, Mrs. Blackwood.”
Paola swallowed hard. “I am.”
The courtroom went dead silent. Diego shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“You are paying your former lover’s legal fees?” Maria asked, her voice dripping with mock confusion. “Mrs. Blackwood, isn’t it true that your husband, Julian Blackwood, filed for divorce upon learning of your affair, and due to an infidelity clause in your prenuptial agreement, you were left entirely penniless?”
“Yes,” Paola whispered, looking at her lap.
“So how, exactly, are you affording a three-hundred-dollar-an-hour attorney for a man who is not your husband?”
Paola hesitated. Her eyes darted to Vance, then to Diego. “I… I borrowed it.”
“From whom?”
“A friend.”
Maria turned back to the judge. “Your Honor, I would like to call a surprise witness for the defense. A witness who can clarify exactly where the money for this frivolous lawsuit is coming from, and who can finally shed light on the absolute truth of this matter.”
Judge Henderson leaned forward, intrigued. “Who is your witness, Counselor?”
Maria turned toward the heavy oak doors at the back of the courtroom.
“The defense calls Mr. Julian Blackwood to the stand.”
The doors swung open.
A tall, impeccably dressed man in a charcoal bespoke suit walked into the courtroom. He moved with the quiet, devastating confidence of a man who owned everything he looked at. Julian Blackwood, billionaire CEO of Blackwood Holdings, ex-husband to Paola, walked down the aisle without glancing at her once.
Paola let out a choked gasp and gripped the railing of the witness box.
Diego looked utterly confused. He had never met Julian face-to-face; he had only ever seen him in magazines.
Julian was sworn in and took his seat.
Maria approached him. “Mr. Blackwood, thank you for being here. Can you tell the court your relationship to the plaintiff and the previous witness?”
“The previous witness is my ex-wife,” Julian said, his voice deep and entirely devoid of emotion. “The plaintiff is the parasite she slept with.”
“Objection!” Vance cried.
“Sustained. Watch your phrasing, Mr. Blackwood,” the judge warned, though he didn’t look particularly upset by it.
“Mr. Blackwood,” Maria continued. “Did you provide the funds for Paola Blackwood to pay for Diego Reyes’s attorney?”
“I did,” Julian stated calmly.
The courtroom murmured. Even I looked at Maria in surprise, though she had briefed me on the general strategy. I didn’t know the exact details of Julian’s financial traps.
“Why would you do that?” Maria asked.
“Because,” Julian explained, adjusting his cuffs, “I needed them both in this courtroom today, under oath, so we could finally conclude a project I began exactly one year ago.”
“A project?” Maria asked. “Could you elaborate?”
Julian looked directly at Diego.
“Eleven months ago,” Julian began, “I discovered my wife was having an affair. I didn’t confront her immediately. Instead, I hired a private investigation firm to monitor her. I wanted to know everything about the man she was sleeping with. I learned his name was Diego Reyes. I learned where he worked. And I learned he was married to a woman named Laura.”
Julian shifted his gaze to me. For a brief second, the ice in his eyes melted into a look of profound respect.
“I decided to contact Laura,” Julian continued. “I arranged a meeting at a private coffee shop across town. I brought the photographic evidence of the affair. I fully expected her to break down in tears.”
Julian paused, a small, dangerous smile playing on his lips.
“But she didn’t,” Julian said. “Laura looked at the photos, took a sip of her coffee, and pulled out a manila envelope of her own. She already knew. She had found a burner phone in Diego’s car three weeks prior. She had already pulled his bank statements. She was already ten steps ahead of him.”
The courtroom erupted into a chaotic symphony of gasps.
Diego stood up, his chair scraping violently against the floor. He stared at me, his eyes wide with a horrific realization. “You… you knew? Before the pregnancy?”
“Sit down, Mr. Reyes!” the judge bellowed. Diego collapsed into his chair, paralyzed.
“Mr. Blackwood,” Maria prompted over the noise. “What happened at that coffee shop?”
“We made an alliance,” Julian said smoothly. “Laura and I realized that simply divorcing them wasn’t enough. They were arrogant. They were cruel. They were planning to steal marital assets and run off together. So, we decided to let them think they were outsmarting everyone, while we dug a pit so deep they would never climb out.”
My heart hammered in my chest, but I kept my face perfectly still. I remembered that coffee shop meeting perfectly. The moment Julian and I shook hands, the victim inside me died, and the architect was born.
“Let’s talk about the vasectomy,” Maria said, pacing in front of the jury box. “The plaintiff claims he cancelled his vasectomy due to a work emergency. Is that true?”
Julian laughed. A cold, sharp sound.
“No. Diego cancelled his vasectomy because he wanted the two-thousand-dollar cash refund to buy Paola a diamond bracelet. He thought he was a genius. He thought he could fake the recovery, keep the money, and get the surgery later. But Laura knew he cancelled it. She had a tracker on his car, provided by my security team. She watched him drive to the jeweler instead of the clinic.”
Julian leaned forward. “So, Laura went home, put some frozen peas in a towel, and played the doting wife. She let him lay on the couch and text my wife, because every text he sent was being intercepted by my investigators.”
Diego was shaking. He looked like a man standing on railroad tracks, watching the train barrel toward him, unable to move.
“And the pregnancy?” Maria asked.
“Laura found out she was pregnant a few weeks later,” Julian explained. “It was Diego’s child, conceived before his cancelled surgery. But she knew that if she told him, he would panic. So she waited. She waited for the perfect moment to break the news, knowing his guilt and his arrogance would make him accuse her of cheating. She handed him the shovel, and he eagerly dug his own grave.”
“Objection! This is entirely speculative!” Vance shouted, though his voice was trembling. He realized he was standing on a sinking ship.
“I have the text message logs between Mr. Blackwood and my client, dating back eleven months, outlining this exact strategy,” Maria said, slapping a massive binder onto the judge’s desk. “Admitted as Defense Exhibit E.”
Judge Henderson flipped through the binder, his eyes widening with every page.
“But there is one final piece of the puzzle,” Maria said, turning her attention back to Paola, who was now weeping silently in the gallery. “Mr. Blackwood, let’s discuss Paola’s pregnancy.”
The room grew so quiet you could hear the hum of the air conditioning.
“When Paola confronted Diego at the clinic,” Maria said, “she claimed she was pregnant with his child, because Diego had lied to her about being sterile. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Julian said.
“What happened to that pregnancy?”
Julian looked at Paola with a disgust so profound it made me shiver.
“There was no pregnancy,” Julian said.
Diego snapped his head up. “What?”
“Paola wasn’t pregnant,” Julian stated. “She was faking it. She had found out that I was freezing her credit cards and preparing divorce papers. She panicked. She needed a backup plan, and Diego was her only lifeline. She planned to trap Diego by claiming she was pregnant, forcing him to expedite his divorce and demand a settlement from Laura so they could live comfortably.”
“How do you know she was faking it?” Maria asked.
Julian unbuttoned his suit jacket, radiating absolute victory.
“Because,” Julian said, his voice echoing in the silent room, “Paola claimed she stopped taking her birth control because she thought Diego was shooting blanks. But she had actually stopped taking her birth control two years ago, trying to trap *me* with a baby to renegotiate our prenup.”
Julian smiled.
“What Paola didn’t know… what I never told her… is that I had a severe testicular torsion in my twenties. I have been one hundred percent, medically, irreversibly sterile for fifteen years.”
Paola let out a wail that sounded like a dying animal. She buried her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably.
“When Paola came to me a week before the clinic incident, crying tears of joy, claiming she was pregnant with my child and begging me not to divorce her,” Julian continued, “I knew instantly she was either lying, or she had slipped up and gotten pregnant by Diego. I demanded a blood test. When she realized I knew, she panicked, went to the clinic, and tried to shift the fake pregnancy onto Diego.”
Julian looked at Diego.
“You ruined your marriage, you drained your savings, and you made a fool of yourself in front of your entire community… for a woman who was playing you just as hard as you were trying to play your wife.”
Diego sat frozen. His jaw hung open. The illusion of his grand, macho superiority had been stripped away, layer by layer, until there was nothing left but a pathetic, gullible man who had been outsmarted by his wife and used by his mistress.
“One final question, Mr. Blackwood,” Maria said. “Mr. Vance claims that my client is responsible for Diego Reyes losing his job, creating financial hardship. Do you know anything about his termination?”
Julian adjusted his tie. “I do. Three months ago, Blackwood Holdings acquired the logistics firm where Mr. Reyes was employed. Upon reviewing the corporate structure, I found that Mr. Reyes had used company email servers to send explicit messages to his mistress, which is a violation of our morality clause. As the new CEO of the parent company, I personally fired him. Laura had absolutely nothing to do with it. That was entirely me.”
Julian smiled at Diego. “Consider it a severance package.”
“No further questions, Your Honor,” Maria said, returning to her seat.
