The Ten Percent Settlement

Chapter 3:TheMeeting

The lawyer's office was neutral ground, which was the point. Adrian had chosen it precisely because it had no memory of them in it, no bed, no kitchen where she used to make him coffee wrong on purpose because she liked the way he complained about it. Just a long table, glass walls, and enough people two doors down that neither of them could raise their voice without an audience.

Victoria arrived four minutes late, which he suspected was deliberate, and sat down across from him like she was walking into a negotiation rather than the end of a marriage.

She looked composed. That was the first thing he noticed, and it bothered him more than tears would have.

"You look well," she said.

"I slept."

"I didn't." She said it lightly, almost like small talk, and folded her hands on the table. "I want to say this isn't how I wanted this to go."

"You didn't want to get caught. That's different from not wanting it to happen."

Her mouth tightened, just slightly, and she let it go. "The lawyers say ten percent. I assume you're not going to fight that."

"I'm not going to fight that." She'd expected him to. He could see it in the half-second where her composure slipped, a flicker of surprise before she covered it. She'd walked in ready for a fight over the number, maybe hoping for one, because a fight would have meant he still cared enough to make this hard for her. "That's it? No conditions, no delay?"

"I want it finished. You'll have it by Friday, like the lawyer told you." He watched her across the table, this woman he'd built a life with for six years, and tried to find the version of her he used to know. "Was this the first time?"

"Adrian—"

"Just answer it. Was Marcus the first, or was he just the first I caught?"

She didn't answer right away, and the silence told him everything the words would have. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost some of its polish. "Does it matter now?"

"No," he said, and found that he meant it. "I don't think it does." She reached for the water glass in front of her, and he noticed her hand wasn't quite steady, the first honest thing he'd seen from her all morning. "I never wanted to hurt you. I know that doesn't mean anything coming from me right now."

"It doesn't." They sat with that for a moment, the two of them and a table between them and six years reduced to a document waiting for a signature. He thought about asking her more, about the marriage counselor she'd canceled on, about how long she'd known Marcus before that night, but he found he didn't want the answers as badly as he'd expected to. "There's something you should know," she said, as she stood to leave, gathering her bag with the same unhurried composure she'd walked in with. "I didn't find out about Whitmore on my own. Someone told me."

Adrian went still. "Who."

"That doesn't matter right now." She said it too smoothly, a door closing before he could get a hand in it. "It matters to me."

She almost told him. He saw it, the half-second where a name sat right behind her teeth, close enough that he could see her deciding whether to let it out. Then she reconsidered, whatever calculation ran behind her eyes resolving in favor of keeping it. "I'll see you when the papers are ready," she said instead, and left him sitting at the table with the water glasses and the low hum of the office outside the glass. He didn't go after her. He sat there a while longer after she'd gone, running the meeting back in his head. She'd walked in braced for a fight over money and left having gotten exactly the number the prenup guaranteed her, and she'd looked, for one unguarded second before she covered it, like a woman who'd expected to win something bigger than she had. That was because she didn't know what she'd actually won.

Victoria believed Adrian was worth roughly a hundred million dollars, and she believed it because he'd spent years making sure she believed it. The public filings she'd have combed through with her own lawyer, the numbers her friends whispered about at dinner parties, the figure that got quoted whenever a magazine ranked the city's wealthiest men, all of it pointed to a hundred million, give or take. It was a careful fiction, built out of shell holdings and a private trust structure his own father had taught him before he died, and Adrian had let Victoria live inside that fiction for the entire length of their marriage because a hundred million dollars was already more than most people would ever see, and a woman who thought she'd married a hundred million dollars had no reason to go looking for the rest of it.

The rest of it was closer to a billion. Ten percent of a hundred million was a number that would let Victoria buy the kind of life she'd always wanted people to think she already had. Ten percent of what Adrian was actually worth would have made her one of the wealthiest women in the country in her own right, and she would never know how close she'd come to that number, because she'd never know the real one existed.

She thought she'd won.

Adrian almost let himself smile, sitting there alone at the table, and didn't, because there was still a stranger's handwriting on a hotel notepad somewhere in his coat pocket, and somewhere out there was a person who'd told his soon-to-be ex-wife a name he'd never told her himself. Whoever that was, they were close enough to know things about him that almost no one knew.

Close enough that finding them was going to cost him more than the divorce ever would.