Chapter 8 - The Settlement
The signing of the final decree took place forty-eight hours later in a conference room at Harrison’s firm in Century City.
The room was glass and steel, overlooking the smog-hazed expanse of western Los Angeles all the way to Santa Monica. Clara sat at the head of the table, wearing an ivory suit that hid her leg brace entirely. Harrison sat to her right, his pen poised over a three-hundred-page leather-bound binder.
I sat on the other side of the table alone. I had fired my personal attorneys the week prior.
"The terms are non-negotiable," Harrison said, sliding the master settlement document across the glass. "Under California jurisdiction, Blackwood Holdings’ intellectual property and equity accrued during the marriage is subject to fifty percent division. However, Clara has waived all claims to Blackwood stock, the New York properties, and your liquid offshore trusts."
I looked up, stunned. "What?"
Clara was looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Pacific haze.
"She is taking the Colorado timber acreage," Harrison continued, his voice crisp and clinical. "All eight hundred acres. The deed will be transferred to a land conservancy in perpetuity. The cabin site will be designated as a private wilderness memorial. No development. No commercial timbering. You are permanently barred from entering the property boundary."
"And the rest?" I asked, my voice trembling. "The money? Clara, you built the foundation with me. You designed the headquarters in Manhattan. You worked sixteen hours a day with me when we were living on canned soup in Queens."
Clara turned her head toward me.
"I don't want your money, Ethan," she said simply. "Every dollar you made after our sixth year—after you bought the jet, after you hired the security, after you started looking at other people like numbers on a spreadsheet—is stained with something rotten. If I took half your wealth, I would have to spend the rest of my life managing your ghost."
She picked up her Montblanc pen—the pen I had bought her when she passed her architectural licensing exam twelve years ago—and signed the master dissolution decree with three swift strokes.
"I took three million dollars," she said, setting the pen down with a quiet click. "The exact amount of my inheritance from my grandmother that we used to fund your first commercial bridge loan in 2012. Plus three percent annual interest. That is my money. The rest belongs to the monster you built. You can keep it. You can choke on it."
Harrison slid the paper across to me.
My hand shook so badly that the pen nib tore the parchment on the first stroke. But I signed.
*Ethan Black.*
With three inches of black ink, eleven years of marriage, seven years of shared poverty, four years of imperial wealth, and the phantom life of an unborn child vanished into the Los Angeles county archives.
Clara stood up. She adjusted her cane, smoothed her ivory trousers over the carbon-fiber brace, and walked toward the conference room doors without looking back.
"Clara," I said, standing up so quickly my bad knee buckled, forcing me to catch myself on the edge of the mahogany table.
She paused at the door, her hand on the brass handle.
"What was the other thing?" I whispered, the desperate, pathetic question tearing out of me before I could stop it. "In the video... you said you didn't hate me. You said that was the worst part."
She didn't turn around.
"Hate requires investment, Ethan," she said, her voice drifting back through the quiet conference room like the first dry flakes of a winter storm. "It requires that I care about what you do next. It requires that I hope you suffer. But I don't hope you suffer. I don't hope anything for you at all."
She pulled the door open.
"You are just a stranger who used to look like someone I loved."
May you like
The heavy oak door swung shut behind her with a soft, final latch.
***
