After Divorce, My Ex-Wife Became a Billionaire novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Papers
At the Gaines Hospitality gala Darrell toasts the company's secret angel, then serves Rhiannon divorce papers in front of three hundred guests with his mistress at his side. She signs, and tells him who the angel is.
My husband raised a glass of champagne to the woman who paid for it, and he did not know she was standing ten feet away.
"To Larkspur," Darrell said into the microphone. "Our angel. The best investor a hotel man ever had."
Three hundred people in evening clothes applauded on the roof of the Lakeshore Tower.
Chicago glittered behind him, forty floors down.
I stood by a heater near the back in a black turtleneck, holding a club soda.
Nobody had mentioned it was a black-tie night.
Nobody had told me much of anything for a year.
"Larkspur Partners has carried us for five years," Darrell went on, smiling his practiced smile.
"I have asked for one meeting. One. I'd like to shake that hand before I die."
People laughed.
I looked at my own right hand, at my mother's thin gold band, and I said nothing.
"And now," he said, "a personal announcement."
He put the glass down.
Jocelyn Vandenberg stepped out of the crowd in a white pantsuit and slid her arm through his.
She was twenty-eight, blonde, and she had been his brand director for exactly as long as she had been something else.
I felt the room turn toward me.
They had known.
Of course they had known.
Darrell's mother stood in the front row in her pearls, wearing the face of a woman who had ordered a dessert.
"Rhiannon," Darrell said, "would you come up here, please?"
I walked.
The crowd opened for me.
Somebody's phone was already up.
He took a folder from the podium and held it out with both hands.
"I'm sorry to do this in front of everyone," he said.
"But you wouldn't have come to a lawyer's office. You'd have cried, and you'd have made it hard."
"So you made it public."
"So I made it honest."
Jocelyn's lips curled in a smile she was trying to hide.
I opened the folder.
Petition for dissolution of marriage. Six years, signed and flagged in yellow where I was to sign.
On page four he had written his generosity: the condo until the end of the year, and a check for twenty thousand dollars.
"You'll land on your feet, teacher," Darrell said, softly, for the microphone. "You have your little job."
Vivian laughed out loud.
Fourteen months ago, on a Tuesday in August, I had learned my husband was sleeping with this woman.
Fourteen months ago I had decided exactly what I would do on the night he finally said it.
I had expected to feel brave.
Instead I felt calm.
"Do you have a pen?" I said.
Darrell blinked.
"A pen?"
"I assume you want it signed tonight."
His eyes flicked to his mother.
The plan had been tears, and I had gone off script.
He took the fountain pen from his breast pocket, the one I gave him the day this tower opened.
He held it out.
I signed page one.
Then page four.
Then page nine, where he had given himself the right to keep "any gifts or investments made to the marriage."
I hadn't read it.
I did not need to read it.
I handed the pen back.
"Thank you," I said. "I'd like to say something about your toast."
"Now?" Darrell glanced at the crowd. "Rhiannon, don't."
"You said you wanted to shake her hand."
I pulled the microphone off its stand.
It squealed, and three hundred people winced together.
"Darrell asked a question tonight that I think you all deserve an answer to," I said.
I kept my voice low and level, the way I teach a room of nineteen-year-olds to look at a still life.
"Who is Larkspur?"
Darrell laughed, too loud.
"She's had a glass," he said to the crowd. "Someone get her a car."
"I had a club soda."
At the back of the roof, a broad man in a dark suit had put down his drink.
Winslow Strathmore met my eyes across the heads of three hundred people, and he nodded once.
I had asked him to stand there.
I had asked him to nod.
"Larkspur Partners holds thirty-eight percent of Gaines Hospitality," I said. "It guarantees the four-hundred-million-dollar credit line. It refinanced this building, the one you're standing on."
The laughter in the room had stopped.
"It has also covered every loss this company has booked for two years, and Darrell has told you those were profits."
The color left my husband's face in a single slide.
Vivian said, "Darrell, turn that off."
He reached for the microphone.
I stepped back.
"The wire goes out on the first of every month," I said. "Tonight I'm sending the last one."
"You," Darrell whispered. "You're a teacher."
I looked into his hazel eyes, the eyes I had loved for six years, and I felt nothing but the cold off the lake.
"I am Larkspur," I said.
In the front row, the chief financial officer pulled a buzzing phone from his jacket.
He read the screen and went the color of paper.
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