“Why not?” I asked. “You’re the one who insisted on that clause. You created the rule. Now you want me to ignore it because it finally applies to you?”
“It was a mistake,” he rushed out. “I swear. I stopped everything. I put my relationship on hold. Maybe we can fix this. Maybe we can try again. This—this hurdle could make us stronger.”
The audacity would have been impressive if it wasn’t so insulting.
I let out a breath that could have been laughter or disbelief.
“You’re asking to get back together,” I said, slow and clear, “because you don’t want to lose your business.”
“No,” he insisted, too fast. “Because we were happy—”
“We were not happy,” I cut in. “I was loyal. You were entitled. That’s not happiness.”
He looked desperate now, voice pleading. “I’ll cut her off completely. I swear. I’ll do anything.”
“There’s no reason to do that for me,” I said. “Honestly, she’s going to disappear the moment she realizes you won’t be as wealthy after the divorce. And I’m not going back to a marriage where respect was conditional and love was a transaction.”
His eyes widened, like he couldn’t believe I wasn’t bending.
“This is my chance,” I continued, my voice steady as stone. “My chance to leave before there are kids involved. My chance to stop letting you rewrite my worth.”
I paused, then delivered the truth like a verdict.
“You wanted someone ‘worthy’ of you. Now you can have exactly what you asked for. You’ll reap what you’ve sown.”
He kept begging for a while after that, his words tumbling over each other, promising everything and meaning nothing. It was pathetic, and it didn’t move me at all.
If anything, it reminded me of the nights I went to bed alone, staring at the ceiling, wondering why my husband didn’t look at me like he used to.
Seeing him like this didn’t make me feel guilty.
It made me feel finished.
After that morning, Xander spent weeks trying to change my mind. He sent messages. He called. He tried to show up again. He tried anger, then charm, then pity.
I ignored it all.
I was done.
Since he had already filed for divorce, I hired someone from my firm to represent me. I’m not a divorce lawyer, and even if I could have handled parts of it myself, I wanted the cleanest distance possible. Minimum interaction. Maximum efficiency.
After a month of failing to manipulate me, Xander was forced to accept reality.
He finally secured legal representation again—someone willing to help him reach a clean break, because at that point he understood what would happen if this went to court. He would be exposed. Publicly. In a way he couldn’t spin at parties or hide behind money.
He didn’t want that.
So he backed down and asked for a mutual split.
The prenup made the divorce straightforward.
I had proof of the affair. Plenty of it. Under the agreement, he was required to give me half of his business.
He wasn’t happy, but there was no way out.
So he signed.
We even offered him the option to buy me out later, because that’s what reasonable people do when they’re trying to close a chapter cleanly.
But Xander had no money.
And yes, it sounds ridiculous—how does a big business owner have no money?
Because he spent it.
On her.
Trips. Gifts. Upgrades. Showing off. The kind of spending men do when they think they’re buying a new life and a new image. The kind of spending that feels fun until the consequences show up with paperwork.
When he lost half the business, his earnings dropped hard. The numbers changed. The lifestyle cracked.
And suddenly, the woman he had called “beautiful” and “perfect” stopped answering.
She didn’t take his calls. She didn’t reply to his texts. I heard through the same quiet channels everyone hears things in a city: she’d realized he wouldn’t stay rich, not the way she thought, and she wasn’t interested in the version of him that came with limits.
What goes around comes around.
But she was the least of his problems.
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