But Marin wasn't finished, because there was one more truth in the room, and it belonged to the woman standing a step behind Julian in a dress designed to be photographed.
She reached into her coat and drew out a slim folder, sliding it the length of the table until it stopped directly in front of Vivian.
"You should look through that," Marin said. "My legal team already has."
Vivian opened it with visibly shaking hands, and whatever composure she'd walked in with slid off her face entirely. Inside were transfers, invoices, consulting fees quietly inflated and routed through accounts that never appeared on any board report: clear proof that the very consultant hired to save Ashford Maritime from collapse had spent the better part of a year skimming from the restructuring fees while simultaneously working to dismantle the marriage of the man footing those fees.
"What is that?" Julian said, staring at Vivian now instead of at his wife. "Vivian, what did you do?"
Marin lifted a hand, and somehow, even now, stripped of every scrap of authority she'd walked in without, the room obeyed her instinctively.
"Don't," she said softly. "Don't waste what's left of this on each other. It's already been handled."
She looked at each of them in turn: the mother-in-law who had never once tried; the husband who had chosen silence over honesty at every possible turn; the woman who had mistaken cruelty for strategy. And then she said the thing that would echo through that family for years afterward: