“Take it, Scarlett. That is enough to rent a tiny place somewhere cheap for a month, so think of it as payment for two wasted years,” he said with a smirk that carried no trace of regret.
From the corner of the room, his girlfriend Brittany giggled under her breath while scrolling through design photos on her phone, already imagining how she would redecorate Logan’s penthouse in downtown Chicago, Illinois.
They thought Scarlett was just a nobody with nowhere to go and no one to rely on when things fell apart. They believed she was scared, fragile, and easy to dismiss without consequence.
They did not notice the man in the charcoal suit sitting quietly at the back of the conference room, watching everything with calm, measured attention. They had no idea that he was Gregory Langston, the owner of the entire building and a powerful figure in the financial world.
And they definitely did not realize that signing those papers had just cost Logan everything he believed he controlled.
The conference room at Brighton & Wells Corporation smelled faintly of leather, stale coffee, and the quiet tension that always lingered when something important was ending. It sat high above the skyline of Chicago, where rain streaked across the tall glass windows and blurred the city lights into soft gray patterns.
Scarlett sat calmly on one side of the long table, her hands folded neatly in her lap as she faced the end of a marriage that once meant everything to her. She wore a simple cream sweater with no jewelry, and her wedding ring had been gone for several days already.
Across from her sat Logan, perfectly composed in an expensive navy suit with a polished watch glinting under the conference room lights. His smile was confident and sharp, the kind that suggested he believed he had already won.
“Let us not drag this out,” Logan said as he slid the papers toward her with a casual motion. “We are both tired, and this marriage clearly did not work.”
“Did not work,” Scarlett repeated softly while her eyes rested on the bold title printed at the top of the document that read Dissolution of Marriage.
“Do not act like the victim here,” Logan continued with a sigh that sounded rehearsed and dismissive. “You were a waitress when I met you, and I honestly thought I was helping you by bringing you into a better life.”