The courtroom chair was cold and unforgiving, the kind of detail you notice when you’re trying not to shake. I kept my hands folded like the obedient wife Benjamin always preferred. He sat across the aisle with his legal entourage, suit razor-sharp, smile smug enough to cut glass. He leaned toward me just before the hearing started, voice low and performative. “You’ll never touch my money again.” The same tone he used when he decided I no longer needed my own credit card, when he made me ask permission to buy groceries.
Behind him sat Veronica—flawless makeup, designer purse, lips curved in a knowing smile. “That’s right, sweetheart,” she murmured. She called him what I used to. Next to her, Benjamin’s mother, Dorothy, watched me like I’d scuffed her marble floors. She never liked me—wrong background, wrong polish, wrong everything for the Foster family brand.