Owe. Even now. After the cards, the house, the board vote, the transcript, the unanimous resolution, the public statement, he still understood me primarily as a resource in debt to his discomfort. It might have broken me once, hearing how permanent the entitlement was. Now it only clarified the necessity of ending it completely.
My attorney filed the divorce petition before sunset.
Not the next day. Not after a cooling period. That afternoon. The house, of course, had never been his. The primary residence sat in the Hart Vale Family Trust. The vehicles were trust-leased. The cards were account-authorized. The prenuptial agreement he skimmed and signed because he was too infatuated with my apparent softness to imagine the steel hidden inside it held exactly as my family lawyers intended. There would be no empire left for him to claim through marriage.
Only himself.
And that turned out to be a much smaller asset than he’d assumed.
The nights after were the hardest part.