“Thank you, David,” she said softly, her voice steady and serene. “Your performance during mediation was Oscar-worthy.”
David wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, a massive grin breaking across his unassuming face.
“I have to admit, Sarah, waiting eighteen months to drop the hammer took a level of nerve I didn’t know existed. But the look on Croft’s face? I’ll cherish that until the day I retire.”
As Sarah turned to walk down the center aisle, her path was blocked by Richard. He stepped in front of her, his chest heaving, his eyes wild with a mixture of fury and absolute terror.
“You planned this,” Richard seethed, pointing a shaking finger at her. “From the very beginning. You sat there for a year acting like a victim, knowing you had this piece of paper.”
Sarah stopped. She looked at the man she had loved, the man she had built a life with, the man who had thrown her away the moment he decided she no longer served his ego. She looked at his expensive Brioni suit, paid for by the company she had coded from scratch.
“I didn’t plan your affair, Richard,” Sarah said, her voice dropping to a terrifyingly calm whisper that carried across the quiet courtroom. “I didn’t plan your cruelty, and I certainly didn’t write the postnuptial agreement you tried to use to destroy me. I simply let you be exactly who you are: an arrogant man who refuses to read the fine print.”
Jessica, having finally recovered her voice, scrambled up from the pew and rushed over, grabbing Richard’s arm. Her face was flushed, her voice shrill.
“You can’t do this. The acquisition deal with Global Logistics is closing in three weeks. You’re going to tank the whole company.”
Sarah slowly shifted her gaze from Richard to Jessica. She looked the younger woman up and down, taking in the white suit, the stilettos, and the oversized promise ring.
“Jessica,” Sarah said, offering a small, pitying smile. “I believe you mentioned at Copley Place that if I ever needed a little administrative job, Richard could make a call. I appreciate the offer, but I don’t think I’ll be needing it.”
Sarah stepped around them, the click of her practical flats echoing softly as she pushed open the heavy oak doors of the courtroom, leaving her ex-husband and his mistress standing in the wreckage of their own making.
Richard spent the weekend entirely in denial. Locked inside his $15,000-a-month penthouse, he paced the hardwood floors, downing glasses of scotch while aggressively assuring Jessica that it was a minor legal hurdle.
“She has paper, Jess, but I have the board,” Richard insisted, his voice slightly slurred. “I have the executive team. I’m the one who negotiated the $90 million buyout. She’s a housewife who hasn’t written a line of code in ten years. She doesn’t know how to run a company. We’ll tie her up in litigation, freeze her out of the day-to-day, and force her to sell her shares back to me at a discount.”
Jessica desperately wanted to believe him. She spent the weekend frantically deleting every mocking Instagram and Facebook post she had made over the last year, trying to scrub her digital footprint of the harassment campaign she had waged against the new majority owner of her company.
Monday morning arrived with a torrential downpour. Richard, running on two hours of sleep and pure adrenaline, put on his most aggressive power suit and had his driver take him to the Sterling Freight and Logistics corporate campus in Cambridge. He planned to walk in, call an emergency executive meeting, and project total dominance. He needed the staff to know he was still the undisputed king.
He strode through the sliding glass doors of the grand lobby at exactly 8:00 a.m., Jessica trailing slightly behind him, clutching her coffee like a life preserver.
“Morning, Brenda,” Richard barked at the head receptionist. “Call the executive team. I want everyone in the main boardroom in ten minutes. No exceptions.”
Brenda, who usually greeted him with a bright smile and a deferential nod, did not move. She looked at Richard, her eyes darting nervously toward the elevator banks.
“Mr. Sterling, I can’t do that, sir.”
Richard stopped dead. “Excuse me? What do you mean you can’t do that?”
Before Brenda could answer, the silver doors of the executive elevator chimed and opened. Stepping out into the lobby was a uniformed private security contractor. Behind him stood two more security guards, and between them was Sarah Sterling.
She was not wearing a modest navy dress today. She wore a razor-sharp charcoal-gray tailored suit. Her hair was professionally styled, her posture impeccable, and she carried a sleek leather portfolio. She looked exactly like what she was.
A CEO.
“They can’t do that, Richard, because Brenda no longer answers to you,” Sarah said, her voice carrying across the marble lobby.
Employees who had been getting their morning coffee stopped dead. The entire lobby froze and turned to watch.
“What is this?” Richard demanded, his face flushing with immediate rage. He took a step forward, but the lead security guard smoothly stepped into his path, placing a firm hand out to stop him.
“Sarah, you are out of your mind. You can’t just walk in here with security guards. I am the chief executive officer of this company.”
“You were the chief executive officer,” Sarah corrected him, opening her leather portfolio.
She pulled out a stack of freshly printed documents on heavy corporate letterhead.
“As of 7:00 a.m. this morning, I exercised my 51% voting rights to convene an emergency shareholder resolution. The first order of business was restructuring the board of directors. The second order of business was a vote of no confidence in your leadership.”
Sarah held out the paper.