They walked out, leaving the smell of her floral perfume and the sound of my children’s cries to fill the vacuum. Mark was convinced my exhaustion would keep me quiet. He believed I was too broken to read the fine print.

He forgot that before I was a wife, I was a woman who made a living by turning pain into precision.

For a long minute, I didn’t move. My body was running on fumes, but my mind—the part of me Mark had tried to starve for years—suddenly flickered to life. The monitor crackled, Caleb’s wail cutting through the silence of the penthouse like a siren.

I pushed myself upright, the pain in my ribs a grounding force. I looked at the folder. Mark thought I was too naive to understand legal jargon. He didn’t know that I used to read contracts the way other people read thrillers.

Before the corporate galas, before I learned to smile with my teeth and not my eyes, I was a writer. I wasn’t a “hobbyist” as Mark liked to claim at dinner parties. I was an investigative essayist whose words had once made powerful men sweat. I had written under my own name until Mark started calling my work “risky” and “embarrassing.” He didn’t forbid me from writing; he just made it feel selfish, a childish distraction from my role as the CEO’s wife. I had tucked my talent away like an old dress, promising myself I’d wear it again someday.

Someday had just arrived with a jagged edge.