“And Selina’s apartment?” I asked.
Flynn suddenly went still. That silence told me everything.
“How much do you pay?”
“Thirty-two hundred a month.”
My throat tightened. For three years, I had felt guilty whenever I bought myself a coffee outside the house. She was living in an apartment that cost nearly twice what he gave his wife and daughter for everything.
Flynn reached for my arm. “Come home with me. We can work this out.”
I looked directly at him. “There’s something else you can’t fix.”
“What?”
I pointed toward the laptop he had closed much too late. “The meeting was still connected.”
His face instantly lost its color. “Someone could have recorded it.”
“I’m certain they did.”
Selina covered the necklace with her hand.
Thirty employees had just witnessed in seven seconds what it had taken me two years to uncover. But Flynn still believed that embarrassing video was the worst consequence waiting for him.
He had no idea that later that night, I would open a folder I hadn’t touched in three years and discover that the “kept wife” he treated as worthless had far more power than he ever imagined.
PART 2
I picked Clara up from her kindergarten in the Sunnyside neighborhood and said nothing about what had happened. At five years old, all she wanted to know was whether her dad would be having dinner with us that evening, and I told her he was busy. That was the last lie I would ever tell to protect his image.
Once Clara was asleep, I went into the room that had once been my home office before Flynn converted it into a storage room. Beneath several boxes filled with old toys, I discovered a dark blue folder containing my father’s legal documents.
My father, Arthur Sterling, had died four years earlier. Shortly after I got married, he had invested his life savings in a technology company called Sterling Tech Solutions. Before his death, he transferred all of his shares into my name, but I had completely ignored them for years until that night.
I opened the blue folder and began cross-referencing the equity manifests against public SEC filings on my laptop.
What I discovered made my breath hitch in my throat.
Flynn had spent the last eighteen months aggressively pursuing a multi-million-dollar acquisition of Sterling Tech Solutions to secure Vance Global’s upcoming IPO. What he didn’t realize—because my father’s estate had been managed through a private family trust—was that I controlled forty percent of the voting stock.
I didn’t just hold equity. I held the absolute tie-breaking vote for the entire merger.
Flynn had spent two years treating me like a financially illiterate housewife, restricting me to an $1,800 monthly allowance, while plotting to buy out my late father’s company behind my back. He had assumed marrying me meant he automatically possessed my family’s legacy.
I immediately called my father’s old corporate attorney, Phoebe.
“Mabel?” Phoebe answered, surprised by the late call. “Is everything alright?”
