The divorce took nine months.
It was quiet, in the end, quieter than the gala, and it was done in a conference room with the lawyers and no press and no family. Julian signed the settlement and looked at me across the table and said, "You were the best thing that ever happened to me."
"No," I said. "I was the best employee."
I kept my own money. I did not take his family's, and my lawyer told me I could have, and I chose not to, because I did not want anything in my life that could be traced back to that house. The board tabled the restructure, and then it removed Julian from the development office oversight, and then, six months later, when the audit finished, it asked him to resign from the board. Helen Reyes wrote to me after. She said the motion had passed because of the records, an
